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#179594 - 02/16/04 11:18 PM
An exercise in frustration
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Senior Member
Registered: 11/10/00
Posts: 2195
Loc: Catskill Mountains, NY
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I realize it may be slightly off topic, but we talk about it enough here, the Motif ES.. as if it's a quasi arranger of sorts ( it isn't.. believe me ) ...
Weeks of programming work is gone "just like that" because the board apparently did an overwrite to my AN150 plug in user patches when I errantly loaded or changed an all voice file or something to that effect. Nothing stays in rom memory on this board.. nothing..
Terry is right. This thing by far has the most unintuituve OS of anything I've ever seen or dreamed of. OK, admittedly I may not be the brightest guy on the planet, but in the past I've been able to figure out most any function and file storage systems on any other piece of hardware or software I've worked with.
Yet after well over a year and change of working with the OS of the ES and it's "classic" counterpart, I still don't get it... The flash rom voices that I saved load fine into the ES, but the end result, the user voices themselves, are gone. The way you have to load the user voices form the exsternal editor takes so many steps that it is hardly worth it. I'd try to explain it, but it takes Yamaha a 4 page PDf manual just to explain how to do this one thing, that should have been a lot simpler, except that the file formats are different from the external editor to the board, so several steps are needed to convert and save user voices..
It's SO much easier to edit and store patches in my software analog modeled synths, by comparison, that it's almost ridiculous to even bother on the Motif. Basically, I have a nice hardware board with excellent sounds and editing / sampling / sequencing functions that just aren't worth trying to use at all. I could have gotten that lot cheaper with kontakt or gigasttudio and a midi controller.
Breathe controller or not, I've about had it.... I want something different... and yes I still want a hardware rompler. Sigh.. I hope the fantom X is released before Yamaha replaces the ES with a new model, so that at least I'll get some resale value.
AJ
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AJ
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#179596 - 02/17/04 04:24 AM
Re: An exercise in frustration
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Member
Registered: 08/01/02
Posts: 2683
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AJ Well as you know I had probably the longest thread in history at MoTown about the Mo o/s and that it need not be so difficult and unintuitive. So no argument here.It's also why I said when the new Fanotm X hits the shelves adios Mo. Even if the X isn't as powerful, I can work with it. When I used the Mo software to transfer user files back and forth, that was a 3 day ordeal to get it working correctly. The time involved to load the extra voices from the cd on start up is ludicrious. One of the people timed it having all the pianos and extra voices in autoload.....17 minutes for the Mo to start up. Talk about foreplay Mike, You're not alone. I had the same experience and finally had to send Phil a pm and ask, "have I done somethng to offend you that you give me answers like you do on the forum?" I don't think it's about being threatened, I think it's more that people get their panties bunched up if you say anything bad about their baby. I don't even bother with that side of the forum anymore. When there is questioning about a board on a forum people get insecure about that, because it says perhaps it wasn't the right decision to buy the board. Which brings me back to a statement I made in another thread about this.....after the classic and now the ES, there will have to be an entire reevamp of the Motif before I'll ever buy another one. The same is going to hold true before I upgrade to other future boards, at these prices I am going to expect and demand more or no sale. The board will have to be ready to go out of the box, not what it will be if they do the o/s upgrades too. AJ, about being OT....it's all good, it's all about music regardless of the boards arrangers/workstations DAW's and soft synths. Terry ------------------ jam on, Terry http://imjazzed.homestead.com/Index.html
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#179597 - 02/17/04 07:17 AM
Re: An exercise in frustration
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Senior Member
Registered: 07/09/02
Posts: 1087
Loc: Atlanta, Georgia
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This is as good a place as any to post this thought. First, I fully agree about the OS of the Motif ES, and frankly I haven't done nearly as much with my Mo ES 8 as I would have liked because I just don't have the time to learn my way around it. So far I've used it more as a glorified MIDI controller in my studio for working with softsynths than anything else, and even then I've run into things that fly in the face of logic. Add to that my long-standing frustrations with my 9000 Pro and we have the recipe for change. And BTW: I switched to Yamaha products years ago because of the severe frustration I had with Roland so I don't think I'm going to be in the market for a Fantom either. In fact, I don't want another manufactured keyboard from anyone. You may recall the thread I started here some weeks ago about the "Gigstation": a concept keyboard based totally on softsynths. I've taken it a couple of steps further and the rough draft image below is the result. The keyboard is simple: a case that houses an 88-note controller, a computer and two monitors. At first I was going to go with one big dual monitor but I decided that two monitors on either side would work better and would leave open the possibility of a music stand in front. The computer is built into the QWERTY keyboard for live use ( http://www.cybernetman.com/), or you could have a regular computer workstation with the CPU underneath or wherever. You could substitute a laptop but my eyesight isn't getting any better and I need large screens closeup (touch screens would be a bonus too). I designed this with live performance in mind but it works just as well for the studio. Ideally I would like to mount the monitors on some sort of swivel so they would swivel & fold down over the keyboard and a lid would cover the entire workstation. Legs could fit into the case lid for transport. Open Labs, the company that makes the overpriced eKo which is similar in concept to the Gigstation, is releasing a new desktop OS especially for working with softsynths/VST's called Karsyn that looks very promising as the desktop for the Gigstation. One other option would be to also use a JLCooper CS-32 mini-mixer so that you'd have sliders that could act as volume controls for the different instruments. I only bring this up again here because I think that it's time for us to break the mindset that we have about relying on Yamaha, Roland, Korg, etc. The biggest supporter of the Gigstation concept is my wife, who thinks all manufactured keyboards are made to piss me off. She really thinks this is the answer, and that says a lot because justifying a new keyboard to your wife IS the acid test. Whether we all build Gigstations or not, this is the way we are heading and it's also essentially what my Motif ES 8 has already turned into. While it's still hot I'm thinking of selling my Mo to begin a permanent withdrawal process from Yamaha and begin to build something that is completely customizable, interchangeable, upgradeable, and as user-friendly as I want it to be. Just a thought... [This message has been edited by The Pro (edited 02-17-2004).]
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Jim Eshleman
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#179601 - 02/17/04 11:43 AM
Re: An exercise in frustration
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Senior Member
Registered: 11/10/00
Posts: 2195
Loc: Catskill Mountains, NY
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Thanks for the replies guys. I'm not totally convinced that I'm going to be a lot happier with the Fantom X, since it's predecessors did nothing for me soundwise, but there seems from the demo's to be some improvement there, and the OS is definitely better for me, so I'll surely give it a good workout when it's released.
Much like Jim says, the Motif ES has basically become a glorified midi controller for me, along with a housing for some excellent sounds ( the internal ones and the Plugins ). The problem of course is that I cannot rely on the ability of saving the edits to the plug in boards inside of the Motif itself, and the external editors do not allow me to access or modify the parameters of the Motif's internal effect units, so I cannot save my finished user voices in the external editor either. Well, actually, maybe I could, but I'd likely have to link the regular Motif ES software voice editor to the AN1x editor.. All that really is though is more steps again...
For this reason, although some great analog sounds can be made with it, The PLG-AN150 is basically useless to me ( not to mention it has a stingy 5 notes of polyphony ). The VL150 plug in has excellent presets, so very little modification is needed for what I do live with the breathe controller.
I already have some of the softsynths I want, and some of the others I've tried sound as good as almost any hardware analog modeling synths I've tried out there, maybe even the V synth. I will be getting a laptop with an aftermarket soundcard, so the softsynths will come with me wherever I go. I'm not sure that I will go the exact route that Jim is going, but something similar is definitely in order.
Tom, thanks for the info. If I do dump the ES, that might be the route I will go. It would have been so much easier though if Yamaha had just added Windows XP support for the SYXG100 software module, which already has the VL technology included. It worked very well on my old Windows ME computer. In fact, it sounded just as good as the PLG-VL150 inside of my Motif ES. I could have just added an external controller unit and have been done with Motif all together.
AJ
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AJ
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