Yamaha DGX660B Review – Is This Piano Any Good?

Are you looking for a digital grand piano? Something versatile that can fulfill many criteria? Something the whole family can use, from beginners to more experienced musicians? If so, the Yamaha DGX660B may be the perfect digital piano for you.

In this Yamaha DGX660B review, we’ll look at all the features of this excellent digital piano. So, let’s get straight to it and find out if this is the perfect piano for you…

Features

Let’s start with the basics. This digital piano comes in both black and white. There are various bundle options available, including items such as stands, benches, and microphones. We’ll go into more detail about these options later.

The keyboard itself is an 88 key weighted keyboard. This means that the keyboard action is heavier on the lower end and lighter on the higher end to mimic an acoustic piano and can be customized to your playing style. This helps build finger strength and improves technique for a beginner pianist. And it also helps the keyboard feel more like an acoustic piano for the more experienced pianist.

The footswitch included turns the sustain on and off. The sustain function simulates the sound of the damper pedal on a grand piano. However, different functions can also be assigned to the foot pedal, such as turning the microphone sound on and off or using it as a start/stop button.

Sound

The grand piano sound on the DGX660B comes from digitally sampled Yamaha concert grand pianos to give a fantastic reproduction of an actual grand piano sound. And there are 554 different sounds to choose from in total, including four piano settings. We’ll cover these further when we look at the piano room feature.

Other voices include organs, saxophones, strings, trumpets, guitars, basses, drums, and various types of percussion.

There are various effect settings. Firstly, 41 types of reverb to change the ambiance and atmosphere of the sound. And secondly, 44 types of chorus, to create a sound of many voices being played together.

The third is DSP, Digital Signal Processing. This one is slightly more complicated as it is a range of processing tools that enable you to enhance the sound or completely transform it. There are 237 types of DSP effects included in this digital piano.

You can use Dual Mode to layer another voice over the entire keyboard or Split Mode to use different voices on the left hand and the right hand area of the keyboard.

The piano room feature is specific to Yamaha instruments and is there to make the most of playing the digital keyboard as a piano. You can choose from four different types of piano – Grand, Pop, Warm, and Honky Tonk.

Plus, there are five types of room settings, such as ‘stage’ or ‘concert.’ You can even change the sensitivity of the keyboard and how far the lid of the piano is open. This gives you a totally customizable environment to choose exactly how you want your piano to sound.

This digital piano has 192 note polyphony. Polyphony is the number of notes you can play at any one time. So, you’ll be able to play the most complicated piano pieces without losing any ghost notes. Whatever the piece, there won’t be any loss of notes or worrying about memory capacity.

You can also layer melody lines, backing tracks, accompanying percussion and effect tracks as much as you like. And there are four speakers included in the keyboard with 12 Watts of power, which give a balanced, expressive sound.

Technology

The Yamaha DGX660B is jam packed with technology to help you learn to play, sing along with preset songs, record your own tracks, and share them with others.

The clear monochrome LCD display can be switched to show the lyrics or music for any of the 100 preset songs that are built into the keyboard. The screen will show the music notation for any songs downloaded to a USB device from the manufacturer’s website. If you create and record music yourself, the score will be shown on the display.

The inbuilt Yamaha Education system has three different types of lessons, plus left hand or right hand only options. It uses the preset songs and LCD display to teach you the correct notes to play, the correct tempo to play at, and can single out a particularly difficult section if necessary.

One thing that really sets this digital piano apart is the ability to plug a microphone straight in via the standard microphone jack. You can sing along with your own playing, the preset songs, or song files from the Yamaha website.

There are also separate microphone effects that you can use, including three preset effects. All the effects are customizable and include reverb, chorus, and a 3 band EQ to personalize your sound even more.

There is a six track recorder that will record in MIDI format. This allows you to record different sections at different times, for example, left hand part, then right hand part, plus percussion and harmony parts. You can then put them all together into one track.

If you want to use the microphone function and record a song, you can do this straight to a USB device. You can also play music stored on a USB device and sing along. The USB functionality gives you a much more versatile way to share music you’ve created.

The connections on this keyboard include an Aux In jack for connecting an audio device such as a portable music player or smartphone, a USB host connection so you can transfer data to a computer via MIDI, and a USB to device connection for using it with a DAW. There is also a headphone jack, microphone jack, and a connection for a pedal unit.

The digital piano can be connected to an iOS device via the USB, or via a wireless network, however, separate cables and adaptors may be needed for this. Plus, there are a range of apps from Yamaha that can be used with this digital piano; however, most of them are iOS only.

Bundles

Included with the Yamaha DGX660B are a keyboard stand, music rest, and footswitch. However other bundles are available including: