Yamaha Motif ES/8

[nismael]

I'm really close to buy the above mentioned keyboard, but I had some questions about it.

1 - I didn't see any "hold" function, is it possible to press a note, release it, and the sound will continue to play, and do that in mono mode?

2 - I didn't see a mono mode either. Only some sounds had this functionality. Is it possible to extend it someway to any sound available on the Motif?

3 - To which extense can I forge a sound? I saw a couple of controlers-sliders which did that (that was pretty cool!) but is that it? What is it compared to the Kurzweil? (probably not much on that aspect, but anyway. Would be interesting to know)

4 - If I want to record stuff on my computer and it doesn't sound like midi scrap ( I think about the 127 basic patches) but rather like what I ear, can I do it easily with the Motif and what would I need for my computer? Does I need a A-1 sound card, etc. Do I need a Mac or I can get pretty good results with a good PC?

5 - I am willing to start back piano lessons. Is that board suitable for practicing piano?

6 - Any other nice tricks we can do with that board that are not easily accessible when trying it a couple minutes in a shop?

Feel free to answer any/all of my questions please!
Thanks a lot for your help!

[Mr. Make Believe]

Let me state that I don't have a Motif ES. I played it a few times., A friend of mine has one and I played YAMAHA for a long time now..

The reason why I play yamaha is the quality/price, the sounds and the feel.
In my opinion Yamaha and especially the Motif comes with the best sounds avialable in a hardware workstation.
The feel of the board is the best I've played. (it's as matter of taste though) The programming capabilities are amazing, but not as great as kurzweil's. The Yamaha motif is the best deal in synth world at the moment if you ask me and lot of people will agree.You just got bang for your bucks. Yamaha's prices are more reasonable than other brands end they have a lot to offer. You can compare the Motif with the Motif ES and decide if the Motif will do for you. The price of the Normal Motif dropped since the release of the ES and that makes price/quality of the motif even better.

If a Motif is the thing for you depends on what kinda player you are. If you are a preset player than Motif is the thing. If you are a programmer and you need loads of flexibility in programming the synth than you might wanna consider taking a look at kurzweil. The problem with Yamaha I have is that it's ristricted to 4 zones when programming different patches and you can't sustain a program and change to another program during which the sound you played goes on untill you touch the board again and the new selected program can be heard. It think kurzweil are the only synths that are able to do that (not sure, haven't played every sunth :-))

Now to answer your questions:

1 - Not totally sure what you mean by this, but you can program the Motif in a way that you touch a key and the sound continues to play after releasing it. Changing a program during that sound as mentioned above makes the sound stop. And than there is always the o so lovely sustain pedals to sustain. If you mean with mono mode 'not polyphonic' than Yes the Motif can be programmed that way. And offcourse there is a mono output aswell.

2 - Mentioed under 1. The motif can be programmed in single mode, meaning not polyphonic

3 - The motif ES has plenty controllers. It has the pitch. modulation and a ribbon (not as big as kurzes) The 'normal' motif comes without a ribbon. It has loads of assignable knobs. Every controller is asignable meaning you can assign loads of different effects to every controller. if you want to mod wheel to pitch and the ptich to mod.. Just program it that way. If you want a wah effect or distortion on some knobs... just program it that way. It's comparable with the kurz, you miss the large ribbon and in the sense of programming patches and assigning sounds to keys the Motif is more limited than the Kurz, but very very very well workable. The kurz is a complex but very flexable workstation to program. You can do almost anything with it, if you take the time to get to know the thing. Yamaha isn't that complex and flexible and you are limited in some ways. Yamaha has better sounds, is more up to date and has a better feel though (again my opinion)

4 - Recording presets is offcourse possible. just plug the output of the Motif to the input on your soundcard. Can be done perfectly with a PC A proffesional soundcard is prefered. But with consumer products and the suitable asio drivers things will be pretty good depending on your CPU. The main problem is latency. Which is the time between you pressing a key and your PC recieving the sound in a propper way. By using the asio4all driver (google) the latency can be minimised to a acceptable time to work with. (for creative cards the kx-project can work very excellent)

By using soft synths through midi you can get some very nice recordings. There are loads of guides for basic recording. Google for it.
Basically you need:
your motif
a soundcard (prof prefered, not a must)
Software (cubase SX or something, which you prefer)
jack cable to coneect your motif to the PC

And you're set to go.

5 - The MOTIF ES 8 Is perfect for piano lessons. It has a fully weighted 88 key board. Feels great, like a piano. And the Yamaha piano sound is in my opinion the most natural sounding piano patch arround. It just is perfect for it! The sounds and the feel of a piano. What do you need more?

6 - Just check the presets there just beautifull. fool arround with the sequencer. Excellent. Programming the synth is more compex and you can't really get the hang of that in a few minutes. A lot is possible and the Motif is very flexible! Not as flexible as kurz though.

Hope it helps. you won;t be dissapointed in the Motif ES 8!!
Good luck

[nismael]

Thanks a lot dude! Your comments are greatly appreciated! You answered my questions very well.

2 - Just a thing regarding my question 2. There were some sounds (voice, sample, call it what you want, Im not sure of the appropriate word, its a preset sound, voice, ...) which I was unable to play in polyphony when trying it in the shop. Is my dog dead with those sounds or is there a way to make any sound available on the Motif play in Polyphony or monophony?

6 - I'd also like to see other Motif ES user comments on their instrument capabilities and limitations from a user point rather than technical one (meaning I don't want to know it has 32 MB samples, but rather what does this 32 Mb of sample allows and doesn't allows me to do). What really demarks this keyboard from the other ones?

7 - I also read that the Motif, when taken out of the box, is not completely ready to play. What else is a MUST to buy for the Motif / ES and how much does it cost?

8 - I also see there doesn't seem to be a way to connect the Motif Directly to the computer, but that you rather have to pass through a smart card reader. Am I wrong?

9(?) - Thanks everyone!

[Tusker]

2 - Just a thing regarding my question 2. There were some sounds (voice, sample, call it what you want, Im not sure of the appropriate word, its a preset sound, voice, ...) which I was unable to play in polyphony when trying it in the shop. Is my dog dead with those sounds or is there a way to make any sound available on the Motif play in Polyphony or monophony?


Yes, there is. As with most modern synths. Certain sounds get restricted to one voice (monophonic) primarily to get it to sound a certain way (especially with portamento). You can always change that restriction.


6 - I'd also like to see other Motif ES user comments on their instrument capabilities and limitations from a user point rather than technical one (meaning I don't want to know it has 32 MB samples, but rather what does this 32 Mb of sample allows and doesn't allows me to do). What really demarks this keyboard from the other ones?


It's a complete synth. It has the best rom of any rom based synth out there in my view. The only area where I find it lacking a bit, is in the quality of the distortion effects. I find the distortions and amp simulators to be a trifle digital sounding compared to the Triton Extreme and the Fantom X. But I'm anal about bloom and most other people couldn't care.



7 - I also read that the Motif, when taken out of the box, is not completely ready to play. What else is a MUST to buy for the Motif / ES and how much does it cost?

It's ready to play. It does have expansion capability at about $250 a pop. I would spring for the VL expansion and the VA expansion, but that has to do with my somewhat unusual tastes. You can read more about the Motif here:

http://www.motifator.com/

and here:

http://www.harmony-central.com/Synth/Data/Yamaha/Motif-ES-8-01.html

Hope this helps you,

Jerry

[nismael]

Thanks for another great answer!

Actually I read the stuff talking about the necessary upgrades when buying a new Motif ES on the Motifator forum. It said something like you need memory if you want to sample and it isn't equipped with the stuff to transfer data to the computer (I think). But I wanted to know more on the necessary "extra" stuff like why I would need to buy and how much more it will cost me.

[Mike Martin]

I'm really close to buy the above mentioned keyboard, but I had some questions about it.

1 - I didn't see any "hold" function, is it possible to press a note, release it, and the sound will continue to play, and do that in mono mode?

2 - I didn't see a mono mode either. Only some sounds had this functionality. Is it possible to extend it someway to any sound available on the Motif?

3 - To which extense can I forge a sound? I saw a couple of controlers-sliders which did that (that was pretty cool!) but is that it? What is it compared to the Kurzweil? (probably not much on that aspect, but anyway. Would be interesting to know)

4 - If I want to record stuff on my computer and it doesn't sound like midi scrap ( I think about the 127 basic patches) but rather like what I ear, can I do it easily with the Motif and what would I need for my computer? Does I need a A-1 sound card, etc. Do I need a Mac or I can get pretty good results with a good PC?

5 - I am willing to start back piano lessons. Is that board suitable for practicing piano?

6 - Any other nice tricks we can do with that board that are not easily accessible when trying it a couple minutes in a shop?

Feel free to answer any/all of my questions please!
Thanks a lot for your help!

1. In Performance mode you can have some zones sustain with the pedal and other zones not effected by the pedal. This makes it very easy to hold a drone while comping or soloing on top.

2. The Motif ES has mono and mono-legato modes. The original Motif does not do a monophone legato.

3. The Motif ES has extensive editing. Either through the front panel or with the computer based software editors, you have a lot of tools at your disposal. The ES has over 1800 "waveforms" built in (Those are keymaps in Kurzweilian), its an unbelievable pallete to work with.

4. The Motif ES is unique in that you can add a Firewire (mLAN) option. So you can connect the ES to you computer with one cable and record 16 digital channels of audio at once. As other people have suggested you can also use other soundcards in you computer but this would not deliver the same quality.

5. The ES8 has a superb action. I think you'll find its action great for lessons.

6. Put the ES in Master Mode and check out the list of sounds. Use the ARP-1-5 buttons. Check out www.motifator.com for tons of tips and interaction with other users. There are tutorials and other guides there. You can even get a DVD manual.

[Mike Martin]

Thanks a lot dude! Your comments are greatly appreciated! You answered my questions very well.

2 - Just a thing regarding my question 2. There were some sounds (voice, sample, call it what you want, Im not sure of the appropriate word, its a preset sound, voice, ...) which I was unable to play in polyphony when trying it in the shop. Is my dog dead with those sounds or is there a way to make any sound available on the Motif play in Polyphony or monophony?

6 - I'd also like to see other Motif ES user comments on their instrument capabilities and limitations from a user point rather than technical one (meaning I don't want to know it has 32 MB samples, but rather what does this 32 Mb of sample allows and doesn't allows me to do). What really demarks this keyboard from the other ones?

7 - I also read that the Motif, when taken out of the box, is not completely ready to play. What else is a MUST to buy for the Motif / ES and how much does it cost?

8 - I also see there doesn't seem to be a way to connect the Motif Directly to the computer, but that you rather have to pass through a smart card reader. Am I wrong?

9(?) - Thanks everyone!

2 - You have the ability to change ANY sound from polyphonic to monophonic.

6 - There are several things that set the Motif ES apart from other instruments on the market.
- The 175MB of ROM, the largest set of samples available in a workstation today. This pallete has over 1800 waveforms (keymaps).
- "MegaVoices" Some of the samples on the Motif ES contain extra nuances for unbelievable realism (guitar slides, fret noise, harmonics, mutes and pick noise) that can be played in a very musical and accurate way.
- Effects - The Motif ES has a total of 19 effects processors. 16 of these are for 8 of your sequencing tracks as insert effects. So when you are writing music, you don't need to worry about the effects as 8 sounds will sound identical to the way they do in Voice Mode.
- Up to a gig of sample RAM - If you're looking for sounds beyond what the internal waveforms can offer, its very easy to expand your library with other sounds. There is even software available that will allow you to IMPORT Kurzweil libraries!!!
- Areggiator - The ES has a very sophisticated arpeggiator. I wish there were another word for what this part of the instrument can do. Needless to say with over 1700 patterns it is very powerful. If you like animated sounds like the good 'ol Korg Wavestation, then you need to hear some of the synth sounds on the ES.
-

7 - Thats a bizzare thing to say. :roll: The Motif ES does not have built in speakers, so you will need something else in order to listen to the keyboard. Perhaps thats what they meant?

8 - The Motif ES has a built in USB - MIDI interface. It also has another USB port for USB storage devices. If you need to move data from your computer to the ES a USB storage device is probably the easiest way. There is also the firewire interface that can transform your ES into a computer audio I/O.

9 - You're welcome.

[nismael]

Thank you Mike!

Its a chance to have you people to ask questions to, because the seller at the "best" music shop for keyboard here didn't told me a lot of things I should have known. Ill try to have a better price thx to that :D

[Over The Edge]

I use the Motif ES8's song/mix mode when I play live.
It is in that mode that I use up to 16 individual programs
or 4 perfs. with 4 programs in them, 8 perfs. with 2 programs
in each or a combination of these and toggle back and forth
with a free hand without sound cutting off.



FL
www.franklucas.net

[nismael]

That sounds great, though I don't really understand the programs / perfs stuff, I imagine I will learn more on that soon.