Yamaha Motif 7 Review

I spent almost half a year (literally) researching keyboards online and talking to people before buying the Motif, and I'll try to convey some of my findings here. (Interestingly enough, I have read many, many posts on the Motif support board by new Motif owners that describe the time they spent researching before buying the board...)

At any rate, here are my thoughts, somewhat in the order I had them as I learned the board. I've owned it for more than a year.

First Impressions

The Motif is impressive just to look at, and looks like it's built very solidly (electricians who've taken it apart say it's well-built inside too). A huge majority of the board's surface is made of sturdy metal (not plastic!). I do wish they'd make the Motif in black, but I have to admit that the silver color and unique shape make the Motif one of the nicest-looking synths on the market right now, hands down. It doesn't look as toy-like as it appears in most pictures, and the metal is also a darker, more professional shade than the pictures might lead you to believe.

Keyboard Action

I have a Motif 7. Everyone seems to like the weighted action of the Motif 8, but I wanted the "giggability" of the 7, so I chose it instead. The action is top-notch: lightly weighted and very responsive, making fast runs effortless and communicating expression well. However, I don't like the fact that the action makes a soft (but audible) 'click' as it bottoms out on higher-velocity strikes (also note that the action bottoms out well before you'd expect if you play a lot of real pianos). The action is also a bit 'springy'; it will push back on your fingers if you lift them slowly... combine that with the light weighting, and the psychoacoustic result is that the pianos feel thin -- an illusion that is quickly removed when you play back a recording of whatever you've just played. And speaking of sounds...

Sounds

The Motif has sounds. Ohhh yes, it has sounds. I'll start with the piano sounds, since that's what I use most.

First off, Yamaha makes pianos, so they know their stuff in the piano department. The Motif has the most beautiful Yamaha grand piano sounds I've ever heard, bar none. The A01 PowerGrand is good standalone, but its clear and sharp sound is also excellent at cutting through mixes. They also threw a Steinway (B?) sample in the board, so you aren't limited to Yamaha sounds. (I personally would have liked some more generic grand sounds -- Yamaha and Steinway both have very distinctive sounds.) There are also a variety of effect-laden pianos (dance, house, 78rpm, more) that are well-done and mostly useful. One slight downside of the piano sounds: they're quite clean and don't have as many overtones as you're probably used to if you play a "real" piano.

Electric piano sounds -- same thing. Yamaha makes them, Yamaha knows them. On the E-piano (and keyboard sound group in general), the keyboard is especially expressive and responds to increased velocity with more than just increased volume: you can hear a little growl and power that grows as you hit the keys harder.

On string/woodwind/orchestral/other acoustic sounds, I was both pleasantly surprised and a bit disappointed. The strings are much more realistic than those any other board I've tried, and they're quite gorgeous in isolation. However, the nuances of the strings make them more difficult to hide in a mix: try out the cello, for instance, and you can almost feel the bow vibrating on the strings, but that realistic sound is hard to ignore in a track. This is true with most of the Motif's orchestra sounds: very realistic, acoustically accurate, but a little more challenging to integrate in a mix than your average synth voices. Ensembles are especially nice; the Flute is amazing. The Background strings are okay, but I would have liked more variety in that category.

Pads are decent, if unremarkable, but choirs are disappointing: they sound nice, but the Motif lacks a realistic choir sample and has synthesized ooh's and ahh's instead. Boo!

Techno/dance sounds abound on the Motif, and since I don't do too much with those genres, I'll pretty much leave them alone, except to say that the sounds on the Motif are both plentiful and exploratory/cutting-edge. Lots of weird blips and beeps and sweeps. Plentiful drumsets, with lots of variety. No complaints, other than that I would have liked a lot more quantity/variety of preset rhythms; the presets on the Motif are almost entirely funk/R&B/hip hop.

One of the cool things about the Motif's sounds is the fact that they're actually organized by category. Look at a picture of the Motif: 16 of the buttons on the right of the keyboard are for sound groups. If you want a violin, look in the "Strings" section. Simple. I'm rather surprised that few other synth manufacters have caught on to this approach.

Functionality/UI

The Motif is advertised as an all-in-one synth, and I'd have to agree with that judgement. It samples. It can cut up samples into little bits so you can change the tempo without resampling. It sequences. It has lots of good effects, and writing songs on it is fairly easy. It integrates MIDI and audio effortlessly (one of its big selling points for me.)

The Motif suffers a little from a difficult UI (for those not used to Yamaha gear) and a screen that pales in many respects (size, detail, etc) to those used in Korg's Triton and Roland's Fantom. I felt that the UI was reasonbly well-constructed and stable, and many UI complaints have more to do with the sheer complexity of this silver beast than any faults in the UI itself.

By the way, the Motif takes a pretty interesting approach to sequencing -- it has a traditional linear sequencer for those who like that, but it also has a pattern-based sequencer that is very clever. It breaks music down hierarchically into phrases, patterns, etc, and makes it easy to build a song from the smallest pieces to the largest. It's hard to get used to, but it's a really neat idea and it's implemented well.

Cutting-edge features

The Motif designers deserve to be slapped around a bit and then given a huge party.

The Motif has a huge variety of features that are cutting-edge, and then a handful that makes you wonder what Yamaha was thinking.

Good stuff

Connectivity. The Motif connects via MIDI in/out/through. And USB. And has a Smart Media card reader. And like 5 1/4" jacks. And digital (optical) out. And SCSI. And mLAN (with expansion). And a foot pedal and a sustain switch. The back of the Motif is completely covered with holes for plugging it into stuff -- look at the panel views on Yamaha's site! If you like plugging your keyboard into your computer, mixer, digital recorder, external MIDI device, etc, all at once -- this is the board for you.

The Motif also has some excellent software features. Patterns are a great way to make songs -- anyone who's ever used a tracker can attest to that. The Integrated Sampling Sequencer (sample slicer) is way cool.

The Motif also is perhaps one of the most expandable synths on the market. It can take up to 3 PLG boards, which add more than voices -- they actually add synth engines, so you can get analog boards, vocal harmonizers, piano emulators, you name it. (This also means that PLG voices don't steal the polyphony of the main synth!) The disadvantage of PLG is that the PLG boards' engines are not integrated too well with the Motif's: you can't use a PLG voice as part of layer with a Motif internal voice, and deep editing of stuff in the PLG through the Motif's UI is just not possible. There are some other aspects of the Motif that are absolutely lame...

Bad stuff

One of them is the number of voices the Motif supports. 64 has been the standard for far too many years, and on a machine like the Motif, it gets limiting very quickly. Motif voices tend to be stereo and to use a lot of "elements" (Yamaha-speak for waveforms), so you can literally chew up all 64 voices with a single sustained piano in no time at all. Supposedly a new OS will help fix this (although it won't increase polyphony, just improve voice allocation.)

Another is the Motif's SCSI interface and SIMM memory. How many people use SCSI anymore? Circuit City didn't even HAVE SCSI stuff because it's so old, although I'll begrudgingly admit that there aren't a lot of other choices for external drive connection. Motif also requires SIMMs for its sampler memory (ships with 4MB, can expand to 64MB). Those are barely even manufactured anymore and cost an arm and a leg -- literally 10 times more than the DIMM stuff you can plug into your computer. And what's with the 64MB limit on sampler memory? A small instrument sample and a few minutes of vocals and it's gone.

Finally, keep in mind that, unlike the Triton, the wave ROM on the Motif isn't flash ROM -- the presets are there to stay. The preset sounds are great, but you cannot replace them with your own; if you want to use your own samples, you need to load them into the sample memory (discussed above). The Motif's got 85MB of wave ROM, which probably explains why they were able to make the preset sounds so realistic.

Final take

The Motif is the best synth I have ever had the pleasure to play. Period. It's considerably ahead of almost anything else on the market right now, feature-wise, and is very attractively priced. It looks good. It feels good. It sounds better. It has some shortcomings, but they're minor compared to the raw power and potential this monster has.

I wouldn't recommend it to anyone new to keyboards because of its complexity, but if you're in the market for a workstation-class synth and you're willing to invest the time to learn it, I encourage you to give the Motif a spin before buying a Triton, Fantom, K2600, or the like. I've heard probably a half-dozen stories about people going in to stores intending to buy Tritons and walking out with Motifs instead. This synth is worth the time it takes to try it out.

Finally, as always -- let your hands, ears, and mind do the deciding. I have also heard of people who have returned their Motifs because they decided they decided they were just too complicated, or they felt the UI got in the way of their creative process, or ... eh, you get the picture. The Motif fits my needs like a glove. It may or may not fit yours. Happy synthing. (-:

Oh, and do check out Yamaha's motifator.com site if you're interested in this thing. They have reps there answering questions left and right from owners and non-owners alike, FAQ's galore, message forums with more info about the Motif than you'll probably ever need to know. (-: It's a good place to chat with Mo owners if you have specific questions about the Mo.