It would probably work fine, but then the question becomes which parameters are going to be available for you to control with it in real time that will make a difference in a sax or horn voice. The way Yamaha has it's internal voices set up, without the VL 150 board, I wouldn't really need or necessarily want to use a breathe controller for these voices, though it is a cool way to add an additional controller for synth voices. In the T2 for example, if when you want to turn on the articulation in an articulation voice, you only need an on / off switch to access the articulation part. The articulations do not appear to have a variable control, at least not one that you can access in real time with a variable controller ( eg 1-127 ).

It's quite likely that like in the T2 and ES, the XS breathe sounds are one sample element of a multisampled voice. The only way it would matter to me is if I could control the velocity or volume of the individual breathe sample in real time. I am guessing you could probably do this by sending a sysex message from outside of the board, but in this case you would need a computer and the appropriate software to do so. That's more than a little impractical for live play.

If the step recorder is gone, does that mean the Remix tool is gone as well ? If so.. that's too bad... I didn't use the step recorder function very much, but the Remix tool inside of it was quite cool for mashing up the different drum and bass patterns. At Motifator, Yamaha has justified the step sequencer's removal by pointing out ( correctly ) that pattern sequencing is much easier to do in an external app. The patterns in the ES were just a repeat of what the arps can produce.. But... Getting an exact match with the output of the arps from the ES in an app like FL, that is normally setup to step record one or a few measures at time isn't always easy. The timing is always off a few clicks, meaning I always had to edit the recorded data to have it fit inside of a single ( or set ) of measures. It's finicky, kind of in the same way that recording styles or multipads in a PSR or the Tyros is. If you've ever done it, you know what I mean ... If you are off even by a click or two, your pattern is messsed up until you edit it.

As far as the XS blurring the line a bit between workstation and arranger, that's all good, but I agree with Robert G in that I think each caters to a completely different market and type of player, and I think that's probably a good thing.


AJ




[This message has been edited by Bluezplayer (edited 04-28-2007).]