I have the Motif Es and a PA80 arranger. For composing my own music, the Motif is easily the choice.

The things I love about it : The overall soundsets ( voices ) are excellent. The arps are very good and very useful. Making your own arps is easy to do. The key feel is very decent. I like having the sliders and assinable knobs to control the midi parameters of my choice. It has a breathe controller option that works very well with the acoustic modeling plug in ( PLG-VL150 ). Editing internal voices seems a bit more intuitive than other board, and the amount and quality of parameters that can be edited is excellent.

Things I don't like: The screen is small. Parts of the OS are a nightmare to work with. I find the sampling function to be as unintuitve as anything I've ever seen or worked with. Ditto some of the sequencer functions ( especially the pattern sequencer). The lack of storage rom bothers me and understanding and working with the disc function ( media / kb data saved / loaded on smart media card ) can be a nightmare.

Editing power / capabilities of the plug in boards from inside of the Motif is very limited. There are software editors available for each plug in that do a much better job, but the software and plug ins don't really integrate all that well with the Motif. I say this because the software editors and plug in's themselves use different file formats than the Motif does. Edited voices can be midi dumped from the software into the Motif, but additional tweaking will be needed because the editors cannot access or alter the Motif's internal effects. These voices will then have to be saved to another location on the board, or they will be lost when powering down. It takes a full 4 page .pdf file available from Motifator.com just to explain this one ( should be ) simple function.

The Motif / ES can be a very good choice for making realistic sounding original music, or as a synth for live .work if you don't need to do a lot of sampling / editing in real time. The acoustic voices are superb. The synth voices overall may or may not be on par with the Triton series, but they are different. I've heard it said often that many who know current music trends and sounds can identify many if not most of the preset Triton patches. You won't likely have that problem with the ES.

If you need something with a very good overall acoustic soundset along with good editability for the presets, this might be your machine. If you want good arps to help you create, and are willing to work with an external sequencer assisting you at least part of the time, this might be your machine.

If dedicated sampling features and / or realistic analog sounds ( via a modeling plug in ) are your thing, this might not be your machine. If you require an intuitve internal pattern sequencer, this might not be your machine. If you need to dig deep into a board's OS to get the most out of it, this might not be your machine.

AJ



[This message has been edited by Bluezplayer (edited 02-19-2004).]