Yamaha DGX-660 Digital Piano Review

Planning to buy a digital piano? Confused about which brand to choose?

When it comes to buying electronic keyboards, Yamaha tops the list. It is one of the most renowned brands in the piano industry. One of the most reliable and widely preferred brand by pianists.

Their pianos are designed in a way to cater to the needs of both beginners and advanced players. This Japanese brand has won hearts all over with their incredibly good-quality products and a genuine price tag.

No matter what skill set you to acquire as a pianist, Yamaha has a suitable keyboard to match your requirements.

The best part about this brand is that with every new product, it offers something new to the market; be it technology, design, or a new feature. Innovation and that too, at an affordable price, is what that makes Yamaha stand out from its competitors.

Amidst such huge digital piano market, there are a lot of things that need to be considered before purchasing the best digital piano available in the market. In case you’re a beginner, the confusion tends to rise.


Therefore, it is always advisable to go for a well-renowned brand. Yamaha has carried its rich legacy with its every new product. And Yamaha DGX-660 is no different.

Yamaha DGX-660 Digital Piano

Yamaha DGX-660 is an ensemble digital piano, which is part of the Portable Grand line. Power-packed with excellent digital features and a great acoustic piano sound, DGX-660 is extremely popular among pianists. Let’s take a detailed look at its features:

Design

It is 55” wide and 5.7” high and it weighs around 46.3 lbs without a stand, which makes Yamaha DGX-660 quite heavy and difficult to move around often. Though it belongs to the Portable Grand Line, this piano is not portable enough.

The DGX-660 includes a matching stand that features a solid and sturdy construction. It is available in black and white color options.

Keyboard

It is an 88-key fully-weighted keyboard with matte black keytops. It features a Graded Hammer Standard (GHS) keyboard that reproduces the similar feel of an acoustic piano.

Keys that correspond to higher notes are lighter to press than keys that correspond to lower notes. Practicing on GHS keyboard is good, as the pianist develop the right technique and the required finger strength, that is needed to perform on an acoustic piano.

The keyboard is touch-responsive, i.e. harder you press the keys, the louder is the sound and vice-versa. It offers four preset settings to adjust the sensitivity of the keyboard: Soft, Medium, Hard and Fixed.

In case you need a non-sensitive touch, opt for the “Fixed” setting. The piano keys are made of plastic and have a glossy- cum-matte finish, that prevents the finger-slippage in case of excessive moisture.

Controls

The DGX-660 is equipped with a 320×240 LCD screen, which makes it a lot more easier to monitor the keyboard. It lets you easily view the current settings and lyrics of the song. There are lots of buttons on the control panel that gives an easy access to all the functions.

On the control panel, you can locate a knob that adjusts the microphone level according to the environment. The Intelligent Acoustic Control lets you adjust the settings to deliver the most balanced sound.

Sound

Equipped with Yamaha’s proprietary Pure CF sound engine, this piano delivers an amazing sound quality. This sound engine is the result of Yamaha’s long experience in the piano industry.

It faithfully reproduces the tone of Yamaha’s acclaimed CFIIIS 9′ Concert Grand piano that allows for varied dynamics. The DGX-660 has two 12cm speakers, plus two 5cm speakers, along with two 6W amplifiers.

Overall, it delivers an amazing high-quality detailed sound which is truly impressive.

The DGX-660 has an impressive 554 instrument sounds for you to choose from: it includes 10 different piano sounds, 12 Electric Piano sounds and hundreds of another instrument sound that will leave you spellbound.

All the sounds are truly amazing and open the room for creativity as they let the pianist experiment with the different sounds.

 

Polyphony

With a 192-note maximum polyphony, it gives you the ample amount of space to play multiple sounds.

Piano Room

This personalized feature has been talking about the town. The DGX-660 offers a dedicated virtual setting wherein you can choose from a variety of pianos and acoustic settings to create your own personalized kinds of the performance environment.

All you have to do is just select the desired piano, and adjust its acoustic settings according to the place you’ll be performing, like in a normal room or a concert hall. In the end, just adjust the piano’s position via the virtual piano lid.

Other Features

Some of the other impressive features include:

1. Style Recommender- Amidst the confusion of finding the right style that will complement the music, this feature comes as a blessing. It helps you to easily find the styles that go along with the music. All you have to do it, just play a few notes of the song you intend to perform and this feature will specify the list of complimenting styles for you to choose from.
2. Split mode allows you to divide the keyboard into two sections, thereby giving you the option to play two different instrument sounds simultaneous.
3. Duet Mode divides the keyboard into two identical halves, i.e. both the parts have the same octave range. Basically, it is two pianos, with a single piano. This feature is best suited for beginners as it makes easy to take piano lessons.
4. Layer mode allows you to layer two different instruments simultaneously on one key. For example- you can play piano and organ, all together in one key.
5. Lesson Function- This piano has a lesson feature called Yamaha Education Suite (Y.E.S.), which is extremely beneficial for the beginners. This function allows you to use MIDI songs for both hand lessons. For example: in case you select the right-hand lesson, a pianist needs to play the right-hand of the song and the left-hand part will be played automatically. There are three types of Song Lesson; Waiting, Your Tempo and Minus One. The music notes are displayed on the keyboard’s screen. This function basically teaches track timing, waiting, listening, and tempo.
6. Smart Cord- If you don’t know how to play the appropriate chords, Smart Cord help you play with accompaniment styles at the touch of a button. It also has EZ cord that is basically for changing tracks and performances or any other kind of changes made to the song.

Connectivity

 It gives easy connectivity via optional wireless adaptors. It can be easily connected from your iOS device with compatible music apps. The Chord Tracker app allows you to playback songs from your iOS device song library wirelessly.

It basically analyses your favorite songs stored in your iOS device and then displays what chords are being used in the song so that pianist can catch and learn them easily.

The best part about this feature is it can even create an XF song file, that plays back the entire song using this piano’s accompaniment Styles.

Sing Along

Now you can even sing along while you play, by simply connecting a microphone to the DGX-660. The can view the lyrics displayed on the scoreboard!

With the built-in speakers, you can hear and get a clear preview of what you sound like! This piano includes three presets to choose from. However, you can anytime create and save your own original microphone settings, with the professional reverb and chorus effects.