Yamaha Reface YC – Mobile Mini-Combo Organ

The Reface YC from Yamaha is a combo organ offering a ton of vintage sound and control in a small size. Based on vintage organs, the YC or “Yamaha Combo” is a re-imagined interface providing 128-note polyphony with nine drawbars, rotary speaker, percussion, and effects for a complete organ experience.

The YC’s front panel offers dedicated sliders for all functions, making sound design and exploration fast and easy. The organ wave section offers five waveforms with selections for American tonewheel, British, Italian, and Japanese transistor, as well as a Yamaha YC-45D organ. Nine drawbars offer different scale degrees above and below the fundamental tone, while the percussion section offers an accent to the attack portion of the sound with controls for two types (A & B) and length for controlling the length of the percussion sounds release. A vibrato/chorus section adds different types of undulating effects.

Additional features include built in stereo speakers, a dedicated volume control, an octave slider, and a rotary speaker section which offers a Leslie speaker simulator with fast, slow, stop and off settings. On-board effects include distortion and reverb.

The miniature 37-note keyboard utilizes the same High Quality (HQ) technology as Yamaha’s flagship Motif XF workstation keyboard, offering a premium feel and fast response for accurate and natural playing. The YC can be powered by 6 “AA” batteries and offers a foot control connection for hands-free volume control.

Other connections include two unbalanced 1/4″ / 6.35mm outputs, a stereo 1/4″ / 6.35mm headphone output, a stereo mini TRS 1/8″ / 3.5mm input, and a mini-DIN connector providing MIDI in and out. Additionally, a USB connection is offered for connecting the instrument to a computer or iOS device. Although there is no preset memory, an iOS app is available to work as a librarian with parameters responding to MIDI CC controller data. The YC synthesizer ships with a power adapter and a MIDI breakout cable.