It was with some trepidation that I decided to splash out on a new synth workstation. I already had a Korg Trinity, which was a tough act to follow.

Rather than go into detail on every feature of the ES - you can read the specs on the official Motif website at http://www.motifator.com - I thought I'd summarise some of the not-so-obvious benefits of getting an ES, plus add my own subjective comments on the practical application of the instrument. I got an ES-7. It comes in three flavours, the 61, 76 and weighted 88 note versions. The sonic capabilities are identical for all three, it's only the size (and weight!) that differs.

Sound!

OK, let me cut to the chase. The Yamaha Motif ES has a superbly solid sound. The bass end is room shaking, the mids are sweet and the high frequencies sparkle and shimmy. It is easy to create extremely impressive textures and sequences which sound as if they've been produced in any studio. Nuff said.

Presets

The Motif ES comes with a huge array of impressive presets covering all the usual catagories. You will find that the number of instantly usable sounds far exceed the Trinity/Triton presets. This is a typical Yamaha trait, and it's good to see. Ever since the SY series synths of the 80's, Yamaha sounds have tended to be instantly musician-friendly and sit well in various mixes.

The waveform ROM equates to 175Mb of samples - a good specification. There are:

• 128 performances (each of which contains up to 4 voices)
• 768 ROM Presets, including 64 drumkits
• 128 General MIDI presets (1 drumkit)
• 256 User slots (32 drumkits)
  

Additionally, more can be added with the installation of up to three plug-in boards from a wide range of available types, including a vocal harmoniser, DX-7 daughterboard and acoustic modelling.

Effects

The Motif ES scores heavily on DSP horsepower. There are two send/return effects available across all parts/channels, 8 dual insert effects and a dedicated mastering effect (which includes multiband compression). The range of types is impressive and the quality is extremely good. The reverbs in particular are very transparent and I would say better than most internal effects.

In sequencer mode, you can enable insert effects on up to 8 channels. The settings for these effects are inherent in whichever voice you assign to that channel. This is a really cool feature which means you spend more time auditioning and creating music, and less time fiddling about with routing. Simply put, voices on those 8 channels sound the same as they do in voice mode. The other 8 channels have full access to the 2 send/return effects which can be chosen from a wide range and edited fully.

Audio recording

The ES does NOT come with pre-installed sample RAM. However, you can easily add up to 512Mb of PC133 RAM, though you must always use 2 identical memory sticks. Once installed, you can sample sounds to create new voices and drumkits, or record directly into sequencer tracks. Each track can be used as a conventional sequencer track, or used as a stereo audio track.

With 512Mb installed you can record just over 50 minutes of 16bit 44.1Khz stereo audio into the instrument, although each individual sample cannot exceed 64Mb (just over 6 minutes).

The integration into the sequencer is very slick and intuitive. Monitoring levels can be set independently from recording levels when sampling, and effects added on playback. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to apply effects in realtime as you are sampling, which is a pity but a minor price to pay for the integration of the sampling feature into the sequencer.

Recording into the sequencer can be triggered through punch in and punch out (set by bar) or by adjustable trigger level on the input signal.

The Motif ES also offers simple sample editing: reverse, slice, stretching and trimming. There are automated features to create drum voices from samples too.

Yamaha provide a CDROM with a generous array of supplemental sample-based sounds on it, including a superb grand piano, a number of highly realistic wind instruments and some massive lush pads and vocal effects.

The display

The display is a little small and can be confusing at times. However, Yamaha have publicly stated that this was to avoid cutting corners on the audio capabilities of the synth. I think they made the right choice. The display is backlit and clear, with adjustable contrast. It's mono LCD however, but with a little use it becomes easy to use and understand.

Storage

The ES uses two types of storage. These are smart media card (up to 128Mb) or USB storage device. The latter can exceed 120Gb. The USB specification is 1.1 which makes huge data transfers a little slow, but infinitely better than floppy! Being USB compliant, you can use USB 2.0 drives although the speed is still throttled to USB 1.1

The filing system is FAT32 on hard drives, and you can use directories to organise things.

Arpeggiator

The Motif ES arpeggiator function is superb. In fact it's more than just an arpeggiator. There are a wide variety of arp modes, ranging from the traditional 'chord 'n sort' patterns up to highly expressive glissandos and controller-based effects. You can create your own arpeggiator patterns.

When in sequencer, voice or performance mode you can have up to 5 arpeggiator patterns assigned to soft keys on the screen and switch between them at will. Nice.

There are 1787 preset patterns and 256 user slots for the arpeggiator.

Patterns

Pattern mode is much like sequencer mode. A Pattern is a 16 track sequence up to 256 bars long which can be made to loop. Patterns can be chained together to form songs or invoked in realtime from the buttons on the synth. Patterns make for an incredibly flexible creative tool allowing you to audition and create variations of complex songs in next to no time.

The supplied CDROM contains a wide variety of superb patterns in a variety of styles. The 'trance' patterns in particular had me grinning from ear to ear. Yamaha could have just recorded these onto audio CDROM and released 'em as a euphoric trance album.

Misc

There are four assignable outputs (should you want to route some parts through external FX for example), two foot controller sockets, sustain and breath controller. There are also four assignable knobs and faders on the work surface. The sequencer transport buttons are 'proper' raised buttons rather than little microswitch 'click' buttons. An additional touch sensitive ribbon controller adds to the expressive armoury.

Software is provided in the form of a voice editor and librarian for the synth, which runs on PC or Mac and uses a USB cable for connectivity. This is in addition to the USB connector provided for a USB storage device.

Conclusion

It sounds fantastic. It looks great. It's build solidly. It's expandable, it has massive storage capability. In fact everything bar onboard CD buurning really. For the asking price (just under 2k, plus any storage, RAM and hard drives) the capabilities of the Motif ES are amazing.

For the more advanced user, the mLan expansion bord takes integration with other similarly equipped devices to a new level.

Money well spent.