For the most part my favorite sounds come from software modules and samples, but for Jazz sounds in particular, flutes, horns, saxes, etc I've heard very little that sounds better to me than my Motif ES 6 with the acoustic modeled VL Plug in board inside of it.

The VL technology is over ten years old now, but I'd say it's still very good compared to today's best sampled sounds even the ones that come from top flight and very large sample sets .

AJ

Go a get a used motif rack es or a motif es6
with the $300 instant rebate on motif es keyboard you can get it really cheap on ebay.
Do not make the same mistake I did. I bought a roland xv-2020 with srx-09 and srx-10 expansion cards, I returned after 3 weeks. Some sounds are good some others just lack sound quality.
I got a motif rack es for almost the same money I spent on the roland rack. Do yourself a favor and try the motif rack es or motif es 6,7,8(best sounds out of the box) before to get into any roland product. In my opinion it's like night and day a fair comparison between a xv-2020 fully loaded w/2 srx cards and a yamaha motif rack es. You need to tweak sounds on roland products to make them sound good. That's my personal experience after 3 weeks of headaches.

I know I already said good things about the MOtif ES but I just have to ad that I so totally agree with you. ES series win hands down over any XV and even Phantom synths.

Even though I'm not a workstation buff I find that I use the ROm sounds of the ES quite often. It's a very well designed instrument with excellent sound set and features. Don't really want to bag Roland but their expansion boards are a big disappointment. Couple of nice sounds here and there but *none* work together in the mix and sound dead terrible when compared to the sounds on the MOtif ES workstations. Plug-in boards is another winner. Roland sort of tapped into this relm with their V-synth Vari OS cards but the V-Synth is a totally different beast. We're talking workstations here and to sum it up one more time I prefer the MOtif ES series - period.

cheers,

-ED-

this old thread grabbed me as i am a jazz guy too and am
getting burned out on arrangers since all I use for most part is bass and drum, sometimes add a little gtr strum, sometimes some horn backing for swing stuff. Never use sequencer. I find lately I like neither using the arranger bass lines or my own lh bass lines--but doing both at the same time...don't ask why, but it just makes everything move so much better, and i can get off my lines when i want to do 2-hand stuff and get a little nutty w/my bass lines too since the bass rhythm is going on behind it. ideally a 76 if available would be better for me doing this, and a kb that could have the bass (and maybe gtr strum too) follow my lh to some degree, have good jazz/latin/brazilian/funk/blues drum patterns, and have
these sounds top quality: piano, rhodes, jazz gtrs, flamenco gtr, B3, vibes, strings, synthbrass, muted tpt,
flute/piccolo, and vocalese. don't use kb sax cuz i play sax. my technics kn2600 has a sound called "female doo-wah" that just kills, so weak vocalese will not satisfy me. I see a lot of recommendations for Motif Es, what about the MO6 compared to the Motif? Or any others?


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Miami Mo