The effects are a real bonus here. Arranged in series, all can be active at once and their transformational potential is huge. Firstly, there’s drive with its piano-specific tonality, to which you add tremolo or wah, chorus or phaser, followed by analogue-style or digital delay, finally bathing the whole lot in reverb. The chorus is lovely, the phaser almost as good and the tremolo shifts to a swimmy stereo whenever the Rd and CP types are selected. The digital delay at its maximum depth repeats for an eternity, while the analogue delay becomes duller with progressive repeats. The shortest delay times are very short and impressively boingy. It’s quite an armoury to have within reach and the only minor criticism I have is a physical one: the switches were a bit flimsy and one needed an occasional wiggle to wake it up. Conclusion There isn’t a modulation wheel, but when playing from an external keyboard, the mod wheel is mapped to LFO depth. One slight oddity you should be aware of concerns pitch-bend: while the built-in pitch-bender’s action is smooth, the equivalent action from an external source is far from it. People, use your imagination, you can take this very small keyboard virtually everywhere and compose, dream away or even showing off.

Yamaha Reface CP Review – Great Vintage Key - Synthtopia Yamaha Reface CP Review – Great Vintage Key - Synthtopia

But come on, 128 notes simultaniously, battery fed, it’s just that it’s small but indeed, you can put it right on top of your big keys and bob’s your uncle. On board effects are great. The reverb is deep, you have two types of delay (analog / digital), the chorus and phasers are deep immersive, and the tremolo and wah are very responsive. The interface is all dedicated knobs and switches, so you just flip a toggle to enable/disable the effect that you want and then dial in the effects settings. The effects are tailored to the CP’s keyboard types and bring to mind some classic 70’s effects pedals and an early digital reverb. The build quality is ok. It's obviously not built like a tank but it's better than most in this price range. I'm sure it will last many, many years if taken good care of.

Customer Reviews

Easy to use effects/knobs. Very intuitive and easy to turn on effects, set levels and get the sound you want.

Reface - Wikipedia Yamaha Reface - Wikipedia

To sum up - an impressive little keyboard that contains sounds that can compete with more expensive, full-size EPs. If you want an extremely portable, yet high-quality EP emulator, then look no further!

What Makes Our Sales Engineers Great?

Users that want a mobile keyboard for portability or compactness – the CP offers great sounds in a mini keyboard that you can take anywhere.

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Ring modulation and FM are the last two oscillator types, with ring modulation the most striking. You’re given independent pitch control over two input oscillators and, as with the legendary CS synths, it’s your route to mad, metallic, bellish wails. I’d have loved control via a CS80-style ribbon and was slightly disappointed that the oscillator pitches were stepped, not continuously variable. In contrast, FM, with its audio-level oscillator modulation, is rather too lo-fi and digital to ever set the pulse racing, but it’s worth having for those moments of dissonant weirdness. When Mod is cranked to the max, you gain a glitchy noise generator.

Sounds

At the end of the chain is reverb, with a single knob for depth control. While its personality doesn’t change in the context of different presets, it’s rich, spacious, and wide, with a smidgen of animation. It’s also has great playability. It’s a mini-keyboard, but it’s very sensitive and the CP’s sound engine responds beautifully to variations in how you play. Play the Rhodes 1 patch softly and the CP responds with delicate bell tones. Dig in a little, and the CP responds with brighter more metallic sounds. Users that need a starter keyboard– the CP delivers five vintage electric piano sounds (plus the toy piano sound) for less than the cost of one of the originals. The CS can sound impressive in many analogue roles and delivers a pretty solid bass end from its sawtooth and sub-oscillator combination. At times it did feel slightly underpowered — this wasn’t helped by occasional odd harmonics and aliasing. Some of the controls also exhibited noticeably non-analogue characteristics, notably there were nasty glitches upon swapping oscillator types. CP Vincent, Robin (11 January 2016). "Yamaha Soundmondo Gets Reface Synths Sharing Sounds". gearnews.com . Retrieved 26 February 2023.