I just spent about three hours on a MotifXS 61 at our local dealer... I have to say, on the whole, WOW!

Many fat usable patches, cool style programming, sweet overall sound...

A couple of things I noticed that haven't been talked about, yet. Firstly, the arpeggiator control is on a 'next bar' basis. There are up to five or six arpeggiator patterns (call them variations and fills, if you like) available, per Performance (registration). But there is no easy way (or I couldn't find it yet) to trigger a fill while you are playing. Fills, and next variation have to be triggered a bar in advance, so you can't hit a fill button and it immediately jump into the fill. You have to set the fill up in advance, so that is a huge strike against it compared to regular arranger-type operation.

Most of us are used to cueing up the next variation, but most arrangers will drop into a fill instantly, and then automatically go to the next variation. The XS makes you do everything yourself, so going from one variation to the next entails firstly, a bar before you need the fill, you hit the button for it (and they aren't labeled as fills, just Arp 1-6, no clue as to what they do, very poor, IMO), and then, in the next bar, while the fill plays, you hit the button for the destination arp. Not very intuitive, I'm afraid.

And there is NOTHING in the way of Intros or Outros (especially outros, some #1 arps are thin enough to work for an intro), so ending tunes without a dead stop or a fade will be difficult. Chord recognition felt smooth, and slash chords were supported in some arps, but still not quite as sophisticated as some arrangers.

The key-bed felt solid, a little short-throw for my tastes, but I'm spoiled by the G70's action... Build quality felt VERY solid, and the display was fairly readable, although some screens use such a small font that I was challenged to read easily from a standing position. I had to stop myself from pushing on the screen itself so many times, because I'm used to the touch screens on Rolands!

Amongst the myriad techno, trance and hiphop patterns were a bunch of really usable R&B, funk, rock blues and country patterns, a few nice latin ones, some reggae, etc.. But I'm not sure if, OOTB, I could gig this thing out without some more patterns. Next time I play it, I'll count more carefully.

I have to confess to being underwhelmed by the main piano. It had a nice top end, but the bottom end felt very hyped, and the middle was a tad 'tubby' and slightly phasey. I listened through a decent studio monitor setup, with a sub, so I don't think the rig was the main factor. It definitely didn't feel up to Y's P-series pianos, and seemed a very poor comparison to the FantomX piano, or an RD700SX.

But the rhodes and wurlis were to die for! Strings were very nice, orchestral voices, on the whole, pretty decent, guitars outstanding (of course!), synth sounds were good and plenty!

Next trip I'm going to dig in a little deeper, I'll try to do a bit of benchmarking on how fast the sampler loads (but, AFAIK, Yamaha STILL haven't made loading Akai multisamples any easier), and I'll try to see how many Mega voices are in it, because one pet project is to see if I can use one of these as a 'virtual' T2, so I can play T2 styles on my G70, and have them address the XS's Mega voices (which are virtually impossible to emulate on a Roland).

Anyway, good first impression.... they had to drag me kicking and screaming out of the store..!