Fran, it's fairly obvious you haven't been to a rave, lately

Modern dance clubs don't do separate songs, everything sort of flows together, tunes (or at least beats) can go on for hours, almost! Trance and techno musics kind of self-explain themselves (at least, trance!). The whole idea is to keep a hypnotic beat going while other elements swirl around and change within the beat. It's about as far from a traditional 'gig' as you can possibly get, and needs musical tools that are definitely different from traditional arrangers.

Unfortunately, VERY few arranger manufacturers are willing to add the really simple changes to their OS's that WOULD make them usable for modern musics (and vastly increase their sales!), so workstations still prevail in this world. Shame, really, as there are MANY things about arranger operation that WOULD be great for trance, techno and hiphop production. But while they are still being aimed squarely at the older crowd (and attrition will gradually reduce that market), they will continue to languish, slowly.

Not good for us, not good for the arranger divisions. Sooner or later, some kind of convergence HAS to happen, or workstations with limited arranger functions will gradually take over (although, by then it will probably be a laptop and a controller!)

By then we wont be around

Diki just hit the nail on the head. THANK YOU

i have had so many different arrangers and they do have some cool dance styles ans features but when it comes to wanting to play over 30 mins of dance /trance, they start all sounding extremely repetitive and the same... because of the limitation to the on board synth lead / Bass / drum voices and editing...

Nick

Well the only thing I'm worried about is the Polyphony.

128 sounds good, until you realise that (from what I've read) the wonderful voices this Yammie has are often the result of up to 6 (!) different sounds to make one of it's (admittedly great) "super sounds" if you will.

I am (relatively) young, but even when I do Top 40 gigs, I don't have the need to do 30 minutes of Trance (as Nick obviously does - more power to him though!) as we just do the Radio Edits of songs (sometimes remixes) and I often mix them (beat matching where I can) into the next song.

I'm tempted with this particular Yammie (I really am) I'm just not sure it could cope with our style, which is using SMFs with sampled loops and lots of live playing (sustain pedal and all).

IF your situation is different Nick, and you WON'T be doing many "traditional" gigs (make sure of that by the way the future could change for you) then I say :

Do it!

I'll be going down to my local to have a look at this board myself....

I see what u are saying about the poly, but still.. think about it. 128 voices... i don't reccon it will ever even go past 80-100 max and that would have to be something extremely busy sounding...

Firstly, the polyphony issue. Most of the XS's voices, although they may use up to six or more elements, they usually use them in a switching manner, rather than a layer (although there ARE some that layer heavily). Velocity switches, legato switches, pedal and panel switches... Many of them only use one or two elements at a time, no worse than any 128 note arranger. The demos and built in performances seem to be drop-out free, from what I've heard so far (about six hours total in the store).

And secondly, about using loops with SMFs... I have heard at motifator, that the XS's sampler loads up over 10X faster than the ES's. THAT'S got to be a huge improvement for anyone that doesn't want to take hours to load up the entire 512MB of RAM with loops before a gig, or wants to add more loops between songs... If you are using a laptop for your loops, it might make it unnecessary, and integrate the loops into the whole arpeggiator/groove player engine INSIDE the XS...

[This message has been edited by Diki (edited 07-02-2007).]

hey nick, have fun with that xs 6..sadly the 7 wont be in oz for another 5 weeks according to my dealer, so i will have to wait to try it out...who knows i might even trade up from the sd1+ to get the xs7..
cheers
dennis
PS do you live in sydney, or just buy there? i am on far south coast NSW..

I live near Parramatta in Sydney Dennis. far south coast - would u mean Wollongong way?

the shop I go to in Parra has an XS 6 and 8 on display. never new the 7 was that far away..?

Nick you might want to go to the motifator site and look at this discussion on polyphony and the concerns some owners of the motif ES and XS have had
http://www.motifator.com/forums/showflat.php?Cat=1,2,4&Board=MotifXS&Number=342691&page=2&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1

hey nick, nah, south of Bega which is about 3 hours south of the gong...it was disappointing to find the 7 was delayed, i got rid of my s90es because of the weight, and the xs7 would have done well...its (the delay in arrival) the reason i opted for the sd1+ ...i am still on the lookout though, for a motif ES rack...the yammies have a GREAT soundset!!
cheers
dennis