In this video, composer Alexander Brandon reviews the Yamaha MOXF8 88-key workstation keyboard.
Brandon demos the Yamaha MOXF8, explains why he likes workstation keyboards and discusses why he chose it over other workstations.
Features of the Yamaha MOXF8:
- An amazing workstation with a massive soundset and computer connectivity
- More than 256 Performances to spark your musical inspiration
- Expressive 88-key Graded Hammer Action keyboard
- Virtual Circuitry Modeling (VCM) effects
- 7,981 arpeggiator patterns and 4-part interactive arpeggio engine
- Comprehensive sequencer (including step recording)
- Built-in 4-in/2-out USB Audio/MIDI interface
- Bundled with YC-3B Organ Emulator soft synth, Prologue analog synth, and Cubase AI7
- Advanced Integration with Mac/PC
via aymat
I might be on my own here but as much as I like Yamaha as a company, I feel like their marketing is just lazy. And they need to update their sounds. That shit just screams dated… its like listening to skinemax soft porn muzak.
I know thats not all the Motif/MOX series are capable of (having owned a Motif for years), and Im not trying to dis Alexander Brandon at all, but come on. How difficult would it be to have a capable programmer and program some modern sounds for those units?
You hit a small nerve there. How dare you be so accurate! 😀 I agree that they’ve gone so meat-&-potatoes that there’s too little dessert. That’s part of why I started using softsynths and not just hardware. I had an SY85 at one time and the sound was crystalline, but the OS finally drove me nuts. It was cryptic DOS Hell! It felt as if it had been designed for the engineers’ likes. If Yamaha would put half the energy into patch design that they put into that awesome arpeggiator & phrase library, they’d really leap ahead, because the core instruments do have a lot of merits.
Numerous patches can be had from user groups and commercial sources. Don’t discount the range that can give you. I did that with my first Korg workstation and ended up with a beautiful bruiser of a library. I even use a Best Of set from it in Logic. It has sounds unique to itself and the lower sampling rate of the time makes great blends n’ beds for modern things from the 44 KHz realm. Your two biggest defenses against the presets are to program a second and third set of your own from them; and to do likewise with patches from elsewhere. Buying Camel Audio’s Alchemy doesn’t hurt, either, heh.
Very Cool 🙂 Brandon is a musical hero of mine, love his video game compositions, use some as ringtones.
And for those that play Skyrim, that is the voice of Ancano for the mages guild missions
That’s very well-put and accurate. Good player, too. I really took off once I bought a decent workstation, because it required discipline I had to bring into focus for it to fly at all. It taught me the practical paradigm I now use in a DAW. The smartest path is to have a workstation as an ongoing partner with a DAW, because the resulting synergy is much larger than the parts. I can’t imagine using just one or the other. Playing a hardware synth natively has sizzle you don’t generally get from VSTs and no workstation alone has the range of a small cluster of carefully chosen softsynths. Arguably, his best point was about feel. That’s the totally subjective pivot for the rest. If it feels good in total, that’s The One. Been there, played that, bought it.
Can anyone tell me if you can load your own multi-samples in the MOXF?
Unfortunately Yamaha got the piano samples absolutely wrong for this product. As a synthesizer/workstation it would have been a very good product had Yamaha not messed up the piano samples. The advertisement for this product states “Of special note are the detailed digital re-creations of two Yamaha grand pianos (a 9-ft CFIIIS and a 7-ft S6) that only an acoustic piano manufacturer could achieve. The finely-detailed reproduction of even very subtle nuances has resulted in exquisitely crafted piano voices that will satisfy even the most demanding players. “. I found all the piano samples on this instrument to have shades that were off. For instance the main grand piano sample had a metallic overtone which was abnormal and even at that it was not consistently present in the same way on all keys. For example on Eb4,D4, Db4, C4, B4 the metallic overtone was totally prevalent which produced an abnormal tonality and would get very annoying if you were playing loud staccato notes that utilized those notes.
This is not what I have come to expect from Yamaha and I was very disappointed. I returned the product.
Do you know if the Motif XS rack has the same problems (Eb4,D4, Db4, C4, B4 … metallic overtone)?