Motif XS

Yamaha keyboard owners are spoiled, it seems, with their keyboard sounds quality. This was demonstrated lately in music school when I had the change to play on a - rather old & battered, I must admit - Roland keyboard. The piano sounded like I was killing a kitten.

I've always been very content with my PSR-E413 keyboard, piano sounds on it are truly excellent. However, 32 note polyphony is quite a limitation. And as one progresses, and starts using arpeggios, this limit got hit quite frequently. And as my keyboard playing interest seemed something that wasn't a passing fling, I was looking around for more professional gear.

The Tyros 4 was just released, but its price tag was way beyond my reach, just as the Motif XF. I wanted a keyboard/synth with 70+ keys, both with keyboard accompaniment and virtual analog synth sounds. The Korg M3 and the Motif XS7 remained, from which I eventually chose the Motif.

Truly a great machine. It would take me over 2 days only to try out all presets on this machine. It has more than 6000 arpeggio's, which is amazing. Trying out all of these for half a minute would take me about 3 days.

Seems that I'm well-equipped now to take over the charts ;)