Yamaha Motif XS6 Synth - Now with Conclusions, and Motif XF "Coda"

[Anderton]

Here are five more examples of articulation in action.

The first one is an ethnic instrument, where the initial sound has a sharp attack; pressing on an articulation button slows the attack.

The second example shows some of the things you can do with the two assignable knobs. This is an organ sound with EQ and distortion on the two different knobs. The example plays a pretty constant part, with the EQ and distortion being changed in real time.

The next example also involves organ, but in this case, pressing an articulation button turns on a rotating speaker effect; once pressed the speed increases, and if you hit the button again, the speed slows down. This is a momentary button, so you can just hit it from time to time to play with the pseudo-rotating speaker speed. Toward the end, the other button takes away some harmonics.

The fourth short of example is of a sax, first plain, then with "growl" added.

The final example has a trumpet riff played without articulation, then played using the trumpet fall-off articulation option. What's cool about these articulations, as mentioned before, is that they aren't just a canned riff, but vary somewhat. For example, the fall-off won't happen with staccato parts, but will if you hold your fingers down. Initiating fall-off without having it actually fall changes the timbre so it "bites" more...those are a lot of changes to just one sound.

One other point is that many of the brass and woodwinds use articulation to switch between a monophonic/legato and polyphonic response. Using mono can give a much more realistic sound, as well as make brass/wind parts easier to play.

[rainbird]

Forgive me if you have already covered this topic -
I am awash in a combination of technical TMI and
gear lust at this point...but will you be experimenting with
and reporting upon the sampling features of the XS at some
point?

[saturnalley]

Craig, I'm new to the review pages and I just happened to see that Rainbird is asking almost what I was going to ask.

With me, it's more specific, though. As an RS 7000 owner, I'm worried about the XS's brainpower--if it's at all slow like the RS, it shouldn't have been implemented at all. Have you tried it yet? I think I've read all your pages (and enjoyed them quite a bit) but I didn't see reviews of the sampling/recording.

When you sample even twenty seconds of audio into a track on the RS, in a little while you're going to be sitting there watching it count to about 432, slowly. I was pretty disappointed--the Yamaha hype was all so positive about in-track sampling--I really like the sequencer and arps and voices on the XS, but I really want to be able to record a couple of pure audio tracks, or do some vocals and spread them out on the keys to mess with--stuff that you can't expect to do effic`iently on an RS.

Thanks for the work you're doing here,

David

[Sirgin]

Hi Craig,

 

I've really enjoyed your review on the XS and really like what I'm seeing so far. But will you do like a final overview of it? And your overal conclusion?

 

Now for my question: I'm going to buy a workstation pretty soon (somewhere in July, after the exams...) and I don't know yet whether to choose this new XS, the Fantom or the Korg M3 maybe (although i don't like the looks of that last one to be honest)

 

I'm into making Hiphop mostly, but also like pop, rock, funk,...that sort of stuff. I'm not really interested in performing with it (atleast for now) What would be my best choice to buy? Is the XS much more evolved than the Fantom technoloy-wise? (sorry if these are too many questions, lol)

 

Thanks in advance!

[Anderton]

Hi Craig, I've really enjoyed your review on the XS and really like what I'm seeing so far. But will you do like a final overview of it? And your overal conclusion?

 

 

Yes, but that's still a ways off...this keyboard is so deep. I've been working with the effects section and performances, which I'll be posting about later this evening. I expect this review will probably wrap up in mid-July...unless I find out even more hidden features I didn't expect! For example, there's a whole phrase sampling aspect that deserves some attention.

 

 

Now for my question: I'm going to buy a workstation pretty soon (somewhere in July, after the exams...) and I don't know yet whether to choose this new XS, the Fantom or the Korg M3 maybe (although i don't like the looks of that last one to be honest) I'm into making Hiphop mostly, but also like pop, rock, funk,...that sort of stuff. I'm not really interested in performing with it (atleast for now) What would be my best choice to buy? Is the XS much more evolved than the Fantom technoloy-wise? (sorry if these are too many questions, lol) Thanks in advance!

 

 

Having ont worked with the Fantom or M3 - only seen them at trade shows - I really can't offer a meaningful comparison. The one thing I will say is that all three companies are pretty experienced at this point in creating sounds for their keyboards, but they may have slightly different characters. I would suggest going to a Guitar Center or equivalent where you play them side by side and try to get a sense of the sound's character - whether it's more warm, bright, hyped, etc. Each has its applications, but given what you want, you'll probably want a more "in your face" sound whereas someone doing soundtracks would want something more accurate.

 

After getting a sense of the sounds, compare features and see if there is any "killer app" you must have, as that will influence your decision as well.

[Anderton]

We pretty much have the Voice thing down: It's a sound, composed of up to eight elements, that you play as you would a standard synthesizer patch. So far, so good. At this point, with most synthesizers, we'd cover the multi-timbral expander module "multi" type mode, and be done with the issue of modes. However, the Motif XS offers two additional modes: Performance mode and Song mode.

Of the two, Song gets its name because it's the mode you choose when creating a song using the built-in 16-track sequencer. But it's also the mode that provides the standard multi-timbral expander mode option found on most keyboards made since the 80s.

Referring to the image, you can see the 16 tracks along the left, which correspond directly to 16 MIDI channels. For example, if your sequencer is creating data on MIDI Channel 11, it's driving the sound "Thexism" on the Motif XS.

Of course, we'll delve into the Song screen more deeply in its appropriate venue -- a discussion of the sequencer. The main reason for mentioning it now is to get the question of whether there's a "multi-timbral expander module" mode out of the way so we can move on to the more intriguing Performance mode.

[Anderton]

You can think of Performance mode as a "Quad-Timbral" mode, driven by a single MIDI channel. You can combine up to four Voices in a Performance (and remember, each Voice can have up to eight elements and internal splits and layers). Once in the Performance, there's quite a lot you can do with the various Voices, which are called Parts when they're part of a performance (in order to differentiate this application from using them as individual Voices).

 

The first image shows the Performance called "Deborah in Love" (there are three banks of 128 performances). The four parts (surrounded by a yellow line for clarity) that make up the Performance are shown along the middle right.

 

If you press the Info button, you get a screen like the second image. This shows where the Performance is located, its category and name, and also, additional information about the four Voices that make up the Performance and the effects that are used.

 

Each Part can be selected, soloed, or muted, which is handy when programming a Performance as well as for real-time playing; however, the selection process requires some care, because if you press the wrong button when wanting to, say, solo - which isn't hard to do - you can launch yourself to a different Performance. I found this confusing at first, but eventually got it sorted out: Always remember to hit the "Performance Control" button (see the third image for this cluster of controls) before getting into muting or selecting parts, and press the "Solo" button when you want to do soloing - and remember to press Performance Control again if you want to go back to selecting and muting.

[Anderton]

One of the things that really makes a Performance interesting is the degree of real-time control. Referring to the first image (a repeat of the first image shown in the previous post re-posted here for convenience), note the four faders. These control the levels of the four Parts. The little red triangles are the levels programmed into the Performance; you need to move the fader to "catch" that level, whereupon the fader takes over from the pre-programmed level.

 

Toward the top are eight virtual knobs that correspond to the eight physical knobs. They affect the selected part, but that's not all; there can be up to three banks of eight controls per part, with the bank selected by the Selected Part Control button. Referring to the second image, the button in the upper left selects among the three banks.

 

Furthermore, there are multi-part control options (reverb, chorus, and pan), as selected by the button in the lower left in the second image. The third image shows what the Performance screen looks like with Reverb selected; each of the four parts now has a reverb send control above each fader.

 

While it might seem that having this many possibilities would be an exercise in frustration (which bank do I choose for the best results?), it seems Yamaha anticipated this. With the Selected Part Control banks, the first bank is where you'll spend most of your time doing real-time tweaking. The second one tends to be more set and forget as it adjusts EQ and tone, while the third one concentrates on the arpeggiator. I found that for actual playing, I rarely strayed from the first bank...but I sure did spend a lot of "left hand time" messing with the knobs!

[Anderton]

Well I've put a few hours into tonight's segment and it's getting late, so it's time to shut down for now. Before going, though, here's an audio example that shows what can be done in Performance mode just with the mute buttons - no faders or knobs. This uses the Performance "Rain Dance," and brings various parts in and out using the mute buttons. Basically, it's a live remix (or at least, as much of a live remix as can fit into 30 seconds of an MP3 file ). Check it out, as it gives you just a tiny idea of the kind of real-time manipulation you can do with a Performance.

[lewey]

oh man, thank you!!!

[Sirgin]

Thank you for all the useful info Craig:)

Oh maybe just one more question: is Roland going to come out with a new workstation soon? Have they announced anything (to compete with the M3 and XS)?

[Anderton]

Thank you for all the useful info Craig:) Oh maybe just one more question: is Roland going to come out with a new workstation soon? Have they announced anything (to compete with the M3 and XS)?

 

 

You'll need to ask Roland! I have no idea...

[Anderton]

Before getting to the arpeggiator and how it works in the context of a performance, it's well worth mentioning that you can do a lot of editing on each individual Part.

As you might expect, there are Common Edit Parameters that affect all Parts in a Performance, as well as edit functions for individual Parts. For example, common functions are for naming and categorizing performances (they can be searched on as well), and also setting the Performance volume, pan, reverb send, chorus send, master effect, insert effects, effects routing, and master EQ.

Small aside: I am really happy to see more and more synths, both hardware and software, include EQ as part of a patch. It can help make synth patches sound much more realistic and/or interesting, without having to try and trick the synth's filters into acting like EQ.

For individual parts, you can do a lot of editing as well. My hands-down favorite feature, the humbly named "Parameter with Voice," merits that distinction because it's a "workflow enhancer." For example, suppose you choose a particular Voice for a part and do some tweaking of the filter, envelope generators, arpeggiator, etc., and then you decide that you really want to use a different Voice instead. With this function, you can decide which values from these various parameters will be "imported" from the new voice into the part...or maybe you want to keep the parameter settings you've already programmed. In either case, the choice is yours.

Other Part editing options include volume, pan, detuning, mono/poly playback, transposition, portamento time, velocity minimum/maximum values to which the Part responds, note minimum/maximum values to which a part responds, pitch bend (for example, with an Indian sitar/tamboura performance, you could bend just the sitar and not the background drone), velocity settings, amplitude and filter EG, EQ, arpeggiator, and frankly, quite a bit more.

One of the clever features here involves note max/min values: What if the lower limit note is higher than the upper note limit? Rather than giving you an error message, the XS6 plays all notes above the lower limit, and all notes below the upper limit, but not the notes between the two limits. For example, if you set the lower limit as G5 and the upper limit as G3, notes above and including G5 will play, as will notes below or including G3, but not notes between G3 and G5.

[Anderton]

Well yeah, it is. I don't know if anyone at Yamaha has counted up the number of adjustable parameters, but let's just say it's a lot. At first, all these options seem overwhelming, and they are - until you get a grip. As far as I'm concerned, what all this editability is about for the average user revolves around tweaking presets to your needs, rather than building up Performances from scratch and tweaking every single parameter you encounter.

Part of this is because most parameters are obvious: It's not like you have to learn radical new concepts, as things like filters, velocity, envelope generators, and such have been part of the synthesizer lexicon for decades. But what this does mean is suppose you call up a Performance and you like it, except...you wish you could bend one of the parts a little more, or tweak the EQ of a part, or whatever. By using the ever-helpful display to drill down to these parameters, you can tweak, evaluate, and save if you like it, all within a relatively short period of time.

I admit I'm the kind of guy who likes to program from scratch, and at first blush, seeing all these parameters made me think that programming with that level of detail would likely drive me insane. But then I thought, why fight it? Yamaha put a lot of effort into having people program the various Performances, and it's not hard to find one that's "in the ballpark" of what you want. Make a few tweaks, and you're done.

Much of the depth of the Motif XS comes from the sheer number of edits you can make. But just because you can doesn't mean you should. Bottom line is that yes, this can be a scary keyboard because of the seemingly limitless potential it presents. And it's all well and good you can tweak everything. But unless you're doing a Pro Review and need to learn every feature at once , there's no law that says you have to become obsessed. You can even play the Motif XS6 as a preset-only keyboard and still do some cool stuff, then pick up new features when you're in the mood to exploit the keyboard a little bit more.

[mrcpro]

I just stumbled across this today, Craig. Great stuff! I haven't taken it all in yet, but already have a question. In voice mode, can you make a program change while holding down a chord with your fingers or hold pedal, and have it "hold" without any hiccups, thus being able to start the new sound smoothly? This is semi-important in my club work, but essential in my praise band during quiet moments of prayer (and why I'm still using a Roland XP-80 at church, which does this).

[Athan Billias]

Although many Yamaha products with less complex effects routing do this ( the CP Series products for example)., the XS does not allow for this instant switching in Voice mode. Mainly this is because of the time it takes to reset the Insert DSPs.

On the ES you could get around this issue by going to Pattern and Song Mix and there you could set up several sounds and switch from one Voice to the next with no cutoff adn even sustaining sound held down on the keyboard.

The XS is a completely new and different system than ES and currently in Mix Mode the sound does cutoff when switching between Parts, but we have put that on the list for some OS updates that are planned in the future.

[mrcpro]

Thank you for your honesty on this. I hope you guys get her up and running.

 

FWIW, Roland Fantoms can pull this trick off, but it's not as smooth as their older XPs, which lack the more recent (and more complex) COSM effects blocks. My Fantom S is acceptable for club work, but not for praise and worship.

[Anderton]

Wouldn't a workaround be to set up four Voices in a Performance? You can mute individual Parts to your heart's content without glitching or other issues, and as the Voice would already be pre-loaded, there wouldn't be any loading times. Downside is you'd be limited to four voices and you'd have to set up the Performance in advance, but I would think that for most musical applications this would not be a deal-breaker.

[mrcpro]

It's nice to have the freedom to go anywhere on your keyboard without restrictions like that. I'm sure you're right that it's not a deal-breaker for those who aren't gigging and used to this feature, but for some of us it's become a part of our playing style. It's very disruptive to our flow (as well as to the sound!) when we're on a keyboard without it.

 

But on an XS... couldn't you set up 8 and use the faders for program change by fading them in and out? That's what I was kind of thinking just by looking at it, without having actually seen one yet.

[Anderton]

But on an XS... couldn't you set up 8 and use the faders for program change by fading them in and out? That's what I was kind of thinking just by looking at it, without having actually seen one yet.

 

 

Well, you can at least set up four with the Performance and be able to fade them in and out easily with the faders, as well as do instant mutes.

[Anderton]

After a stressful week, I thought I'd treat myself to some more quality time with the XS6, and figured that the arpeggiator would be fun to check out. Well it is, but let me tell, you it required a little brainpower - the arpeggiation is as deep as everything else. Which means it's really deep.

For a given Voice, when you're in play mode, the Arpeggiation screen (see image) is all about enabling and controlling during performance - editing the patterns you're going to enable and control occurs elsewhere, which we'll also get to. Note the five ARP tabs along the bottom: You can switch freely among them while playing (with the option to have one play only after the previous one has finished - cool), which goes a long way to reducing the "fatigue factor" of straight arpeggiation. The same screen is visible for all tabs.

From top to bottom, Switch is just that: It turns arpeggiation on or off. Hold keeps the arpeggiator going even when you remove your fingers from the keys. So far, that's normal, but there's a third hold option called "Sync Off." If you release your fingers from the keys, the arpeggiator keeps running in the background (but without triggering any notes) so that once you play again, the notes pick up from whatever the arpeggiator is playing at that moment.

Tempo shows the selected tempo, but if you're synched to MIDI, it doesn't show the incoming tempo but just says "MIDI."

Velocity Limit sets the range of velocities that will trigger the arpeggiator. I gravitated toward having the arpeggiator happen at lower velocities, so it would arpeggiate the noise I was holding with my left hand, but I could pound out loud solo lines over it with my right hand. The limit also has the same kind of "hole" feature discussed earlier when programming ranges in that if you set the lower limit higher than the higher limit, then no arpeggiation occurs between those two points, but will happen from 1 to the lower limit and from the higher limit to 127.

The four lower rows of parameters choose the actual arpeggiation pattern. Hold on to your hats, because there are 6,633 patterns. And yes, I listened to every single one (just kidding!). In what is clearly a move to keep their customers from going insane, Yahama has categoried the various arpeggiations into two banks (preset and user), 17 categories (including control, so you can arpeggiate things like pan, not just notes), and five sub-categories (rock, R&B, electronic, world, and general). So for example, if you want a salsa-type arpeggiation pattern that goes well with piano, choose Keyboard as a category, World as a sub-category, and start exploring. And yeah, there's a lot of exploring to do...

[Anderton]

And if you want to get down and dirty with programming the arpeggiator, here's your screen of choice (refer to the image). This is being used in Edit-Common mode so it affects all elements within a voice; you can't apply arpeggiation to a lesser number of elements in a voice.

Some of these parameters are the same as for the previous screen, so let's deal with the ones that are different. Changing Timing (or what I affectionately call the "Ableton Live Session View switch") determines whether selecting a new Arp tab changes to the new arpeggiation immediately, or waits until the beginning of the next measure.

Note Limit works similarly to velocity limit; one application that I immediately found useful was to have arpeggiation in the bass range while leaving the higher ranges free to play melodies.

Key Mode is pretty cool. When set to Sort, it plays notes in the same order whenever you play those notes. In Thru mode, the sequence changes depending on the order in which you played the notes. Direct plays just the notes, which might seem like a useless function with an arpeggiator - why not just turn it off? Ah, because remember, you can also use the arpeggiator to change pan, tone, etc. In that case, you might want the note attributes to arpeggiate, but not the notes themselves. There are also settings for sort+direct and thru+direct, which is useful when you want to emphasize your playing, but have arpeggiations occurring in the background.

Velocity mode chooses whether the arpeggio plays back with velocities preset in the arpeggiation pattern (original), or with the dynamics of your playing (thru). Output Octave Shift specifies the maximum range; use this when you want the arpeggio to "ripple" over multiple octaves.

We already met the Bank, Category, etc. parameters so let's move to the invaluable Velocity Rate parameter. This offsets the velocity of the arpeggiated notes compared to what you played, which I found very useful in sort+direct and thru+direct for putting the arpeggio more in the background. Gate Time Rate basically determines the default length for the arpeggiated note; turn it to -100, and the net effect is highly percussive, whereas +100 gives the longest length.

[Anderton]

So just as I was thinking "I sure wish they'd made Velocity Rate and Gate Time Rate something you could access from the Play screen," I realized that yup, one of the banks for the rotary controls on the control surface tie in to arpeggiator parameters: Gate Time, Velocity, Octave Range, Tempo, and four other parameters we'll meet in the next post (Swing, Unit Multiply, Quantize Value, and Quantize Strength).

Think about it...you can call up five different arpeggiation patterns per voice at any time, from literally thousands of presets as well as your own presets; then once it's up and running, you can tweak aspects of the sound in real time with the knobs. If you've thought of arpeggiators as "corny effects that were fine for Tangerine Dream but let's leave it at that," the way the Motif XS handles arpeggiation just might change your mind.

It's not just that it arpeggiates, but some of the patterns will likely inspire you, the same way having a good drum beat in the background can inspire you. When I record some of the audio examples tomorrow, you'll hear what I mean. Many of the arpeggiations are more like lyrical phrases than your usual "mating dance of the robots"-type effect.

So you think we're done? Not quite...

[Anderton]

Check out the last of our arpeggiation screens, which Yamaha calls the "Arpeggiator Other" screen (I guess they used up their creativity on the arpeggiator itself).

Unit Multiply goes from half-time to double-time, with several stops inbetween for syncopated effect (e,g,, having it churn along at 66% of the stated tempo). Quantize value, strength, and swing will be familiar to anyone who's used a MIDI sequencer, and we've already met the remaining parameters in the left column.

In the right column, Loop determines if the arpeggio plays through once, or keeps playing as long as the keys are held down. Trigger mode is a bit esoteric - in addition to the usual "hold down keys it plays, release keys it stops," there's a toggle mode where you start by hitting a key and stop by hitting a key (release has no effect).

To understand that next two parameters, we need to understand the concept of an Accent Phrase. This is a variation built into the arpeggio that plays back at velocities higher than that specified under Accent Vel Threshold. Accent Start Quantize causes this phrase to be triggered either as soon as it receives a note that exceeds the Accent Vel Threshold, or at a specific place specified within the arpeggio (assuming it has first received a note that exceeds the Accent Vel Threshold).

Random SFX is another one of those "We have an unlimited R&D budget! Cool!! Let's see what else we can throw in!" kind of features. Some arpeggios trigger particular effects, the classic example being fret squeak noise when a note's released. You can turn this feature on or off, and if on, you can further specify its velocity offset compared to the note you played (after all, you'll probably not want the effect to drown out your playing) and whether it plays with its pre-programmed velocity, or the velocity associated with what you played.

So really, when you get right down it, this is less an arpeggiator than a mini-sequence/phrase/arpeggio generator. And it's in keeping with everything else I've found so far on the Motif XS6: very deep. Again, let me emphasize, it's easy to get overwhelmed with all these options (you don't even want to know how long it took me to write these four posts). But you'll probably gravitate to certain favorites and just take comfort knowing the other ones are there if you need them.

Oh, one other interesting thing: I think Yamaha must recognize how daunting all these features can seem, as they've marked the most crucial parameters with asterisks. This is actually a very cool concept when you think about it; they're saying "Here's the most useful stuff, learn the rest when you have a chance."

[saturnalley]

I was tempted by the M3 yesterday but the layout seemed insane, compared to the XS. It would've taken me months to even find out if I could successfully arrange on the M3, using Karma. I could tell the XS was masterable and as you say

DEEP


--I think it's the evidence of good taste in patterns and sounds that gave me confidence to buy XS.Still, I'm wondering why these relatively expensive, beautifully built, innovative workstations, don't utilize markers or easy-access locate points. Even my VS 1680 has BANKS of markers.