I am making plans to get the Motif ES 8 also but I'm not in any hurry (next month will do just fine ). I did get the Motif ES DVD yesterday and my wife and I watched it. This is well worth getting. A lot of things that the ES does seem like common-sense things that should have been done in the first Motif - like chord recognition on the arpeggios - duh! It's nice that the DVD producers actually acknowledge that chord-recognition is a technology used in arrangers (!).

But it occurs to me that with five button-assignable arps plus the slide controllers and stuff, the ES is very close to being an arranger... at least it has the potential to be one if the user so chooses. The main difference between arps on the Motif and styles on an arranger is the auto-fill (aka drum pickup) that happens when you move between verse and chorus patterns. This is something that we're all used hearing to from typical 20th-century pop music, but pop music isn't what it used to be and today you often hear songs that go from verse to chorus and back without the drum segue. The Motif ES easily does this right out of the box. Plus, the way you can slice up drum-loop samples and create variations just begs to be used in an arranger fashion.

I don't think there's any doubt that the Motif ES is primarily a powerful production workstation with live applications, but it crosses into the arranger field in many ways too. This'll likely be the synth that gets the pros to pay more attention to arrangers. I think it's a sign of things to come, and probably the Motif ES will be the synth of choice for 2004.