Yamaha MOTIF keyboard opinions wanted....

Hello everybody, I was just wondering if anyone out there could give me their opinions on the Yamaha MOTIF 8 keyboard. I'm thinking of getting one, and would like to hear some opinions about it, if you could please share your experiences, I played one the other day, and fell in love with it TIA for your comments....

Regards,

Ease of Use 7.9 (17 responses) Features 7.9 (17 responses) Expressiveness/Sounds 8.5 (17 responses) Reliability 7.3 (17 responses) Customer Support 7.7 (17 responses) Overall Rating 8.4 (17 responses) Submit a review for this product!

Motif8 = Great out-of-the-box piano and elpiano sounds ( allthough I hardly ever would use the internal piano sound - it's not as good, as some of the dedicated stuff out there ). Great feeling keys. Good efx. Comes with built-in SCSI and USB. Sampler is not that usefull, due to extremely loooooong load times both SCSI and SmartMedia Card ( longer than my Triton, K2500, S6000 and XV5080 - so ie. probably the slowest on the market. Only thing slower I own, is another Yamaha - the EX5) . Sequencer is very unintuitive. Compared to the Triton, the Motif has only 1 bank of userwriteable patches - whereas in the Triton all banks are ram ( BIG plus in a live situation). The Motif has some 'stairstepping' problems when using pitchbend. Nice option for plugin-boards, but unfortunately they operate with some latency, that makes the piano-plugin-board unusable to me, as it doesn't keep up, if I'm playing fast or dense passages. When using layered sounds, it seems to voice-steel notes faster than my other machines. If you plan on using it live, take into consideration, that it is designed poorly for that use - it's way bigger and heavier, than it needs to be ( personally I got rid of the big, chunky wooden endpieces, which add a few inches to the already recordbreaking length of the board ), the lettering on the board for 'category search' etc. is almost unreadable in stage lighting, the controller knobs are placed inconveniently so, that if you use a second keyboard on top, they are out of reach.

All that said, I'm still using it both in the studio and live - but question some of Yamaha's design decisions.

A big positive is, like most Yamaha gear, it's built like a tank - unlike everything Kurzweil, that tends to break and wear out very easily.

The bottomline is, it's sound, so if you like it, go for it, but keep in mind it's shortcomings.

ML. Kim Hansen

I own a motif and the piano sounds are great as long as you don't play slow sustained stuff. Then the sound is very electronic buzzy. The other sounds are killer too. The operating system is a mess and very hard to learn. If you want to learn all the features plan on a lot of work. If you just want to play good organs, rhodes, piano's and such it's really good.

I have a Motif 6 and I, like the others here, love most of the sounds. They are very 'big', with a lot of life and presence to them. I agree with assessments of the sequencer and os - very non-intuitive and somewhat hard to use. I consider the sequencer to be a non-starter - just don't even bother to use it. The sampler is so-so, with loading times definitely an issue, as well as other aspects of it's design not too wonderful. But it is useable and some of the auto-features are cool.

My real dream would be to have the Motif sounds in a rack, leaving off the sequencer and sampler. Just give me the sounds ! They are sort of headed that way with the new S90, which I understand features a lot of the Motif sounds, along with a full 88-key weighted keyboard. Unfortunately, they are using the Motif 8 keyboard, instead of the S80 keyboard, which I like better personally. But I might be in the minority there - the Motif 8 keyboard has gotten a lot of positive reviews.

All-in-all, I believe the Motif is worth the price for the sounds alone. I would not pay more than $1500 (what I paid) for a Motif 6 and you shouldn't either. Also, don't buy it thinking it will be an all-in-one, do-everything workstation. I originally bought it hoping just that and I was quite disappointed. I finally decided it was worth keeping for the sounds but I'd ditch the keyboard version in a minute for a scaled-down rack version.

Damn, I just got bit by a mosquito ! Hope it wasn't carrying the West Nile Virus ...

JD