Yesterday Yamaha brought down a prototype unit of their newly announced Motif XF workstation. The latest iteration of their flagship workstation, it has been given a bit of a makeover after consultation with Motif users, there's now a number of additions and mods.
I'll let Yamaha's Bert Smorenburg do his thing and leave you with some bullet points to mull over as well as some UK pricing info.
I also got the opportunity to ask a few questions before the unit was whisked back to the Yamaha labororitories. These will follow soon.
UK RRP's inc VAT
MOTIF XF6 £2520 MOTIF XF7 E2932 MOTIF XF8 E3497
All models are going to be available with a 512MB Flash Rom board bundle for around £50 more than base unit price.
FW16E Firewire board £329 - gives 16 IO of audio to and from DAW.
Individual prices of the FL512MB and FL1024MB flash boards are still to be confirmed.
Main Features
741MB of internal Wave ROM (over twice that of the previous Motif XS) including incredibly realistic pianos, acoustic instruments and vintage synths.
Up to 2GB of optional Flash Wave memory. Finally it is possible to save your samples to the internal memory of your synth so they are always there when you turn it on.
A sophisticated 8-element synth architecture with XSpanded articulation and 18 different filter types let you shape your sound anyway you want, and 8 front panel knobs and sliders make it easy to do - even in real time.
1664 Voices and 97 Drum Kits put more sounds at your fingertips than ever before.
128MB of onboard volatile sample RAM -- for user sampling, loading and auditioning sample libraries or adding vocals and real instruments to your Motif XF.
An improved User Interface with many user-requested features.
The popular FSX (Motif XF6/7) and BH (Motif XF8) keyboard actions let you express your passion for playing. 61 key, 76 key and 88-note weighted action.
512 Performances combine 4 Voices and 4 Intelligent Arpeggiators that instantly create backing tracks with Yamaha’s intuitive Direct Performance Recording feature.
An integrated Yamaha Digital Mixer that includes 3-band EQ for each part, 8 Dual Insertion effects, 2 System effects, an overall Master effect and Master EQ
Direct-to-USB recording and playback lets you record your final mixes to any connected USB memory device as CD-quality WAV files, or play WAV files created on your computer back on the XF.
New large format (512MB - 1GB) Voice libraries from Garritan, Sonic Reality, Easy Sounds and more plus new Motif-specific software tools, including waveform editors, sample format convertors and arp managers.