Nick,

I agree that one can emulate a lot of today's popular music with the Motif series boards, but for quite a few players and songwriters, a lot of the allure in certain areas of the electronica genres is in trying to come up with and blend new soundscapes. Workstations can do the "been there done that" stuff very well, but for me, for cutting edge sounds, it makes more sense to have a dedicated synth with sampling and analog or analog modeled filters.

This is not a strength of the Motif ES, or any other workstation for that matter.
You can add your own samples, a tedious task at best in the Motif ES, but quite doable. Still, the filtering scheme just isn't there. Add to that the fact that you have to scroll through menus to change a lot of the parameters that are there. There isn't enough real time control to satisfy me when I want to warp a sound or create a new one.

The ES is a great instrument for what it does, and it does a lot of things quite well. I'm still happy with mine. It just isn't my first ( or 2d or 3rd ..etc ) choice when I am looking for fat analog sounds or for more modern cutting edge sample based sounds. If I had bought it with the mindset that it was going to be the equivalent of a dedicated synth, I would have walked away quite disappointed.

AJ



[This message has been edited by Bluezplayer (edited 04-15-2007).]