I'm kinda thinking about getting a new keyboard and both look good.

I already have Yamaha P250 with 88 weighted keys and piano sounds etc.

I want a new keybaord to use for the other soudns... esp "fat" synth horns like Prince and the Time used.

I heard the Motif can sample too, and maybe has drum machine features? I twoudl be great to have one board that can give me fat sounds, and use like a drum machine with samples.

I only need 61 keys and want the cheaper vresions of each.

Anyone have thoughts on these 2?

GaryMF said:

the keyboardist of my band has Yamaha Motif ES. In his opinion thats the better one. but dont know which better 4 prince-sound

Gary - it seems the KORG/Yamaha discussion pops up regularly on this board. I've played both and own the Korg. Both have waaaaay more capabilities than i'll ever put to good use. With that said, I'm happy with the Korg, but i'm sure that I would say the same about the Yamaha had i gone that route.

Anywhoo - it's all what you do with it after you pull it out of the box if you get what i'm saying...

Good luck on your decision!

the new clavia stage looks the muts nuts to me!

I got the electro and have always wanted the nord lead but this new unit combines both!

i have both and the motif is better for real sounds...pianos ...strings...brass...ect..
the triton is better for KOOL modern sounds...think radio or neptunes...but they both are great

http://motifhelp.tripod.com/motifvs.html

A review from musicplayer site by a guy named Steve


Raw Sound Quality

I just auditioned the Motif-6 at a Guitar Center in Oxnard, about an hour north of L.A., CA. The folks there were nice enough to let me take it into the high-end room where they keep the ProTools n stuff, and I was able to A/B it with a Triton. Both went stereo into a Panasonic DA-7 mixer and were matched for volume before being heard through Mackie HR-824 speakers.

I spent about an hour carefully dialing up similar sounds from the Motif and Triton, and playing sustained notes in all ranges. I didn't address any of the sequencing or sampling features, as my main concern was sound quality. For all sounds, I made it a point to bypass all effects so I could hear the unaffected quality of the waveROM. Here's my highly subjective $0.02...

PIANO: Motif was vastly superior, even to the Triton's "Pianos and Classic Keyboards" expansion card. Phasing and loop points in the lower range were less noticeable on the Motif. The highest notes played on the Korg were merely OK, but after playing the Motif you really noticed the Korg's aliasing and bright, unnatural quality. That's not to say the Motif sound isn't bright overall: it certainly has the same edge as a S-80 or CS-6x. A Kurzweil is much flatter by comparison. The Motif's piano sounds (especially "Power Grand" and "Jazz Grand") subjectively seemed to have a bit more beef and naturalness than my S-80, too.

ELECTRIC PIANO: Motif blew Triton away here too. All the EP sounds I liked from my S-80 appear to have been improved upon, though there's not a sound-for-sound correspondence. Notable were "Vintage 74" and "Sweetness." The former was kind of a dirty sound, and when I turned the insert and master effects off, sounded simply like the Stage 73 that sits in my living room. You could hear the tines, but they didn't have that terrible exaggeration that many Rhodes samples do, especially in the high end where they were appropriately dark. Right on the money.
"Sweetness" was the classic Michael McDonald Fagen sound, and again, didn't lose beef with the FX killed. The closest thing I found on the Triton was the "Steely Keys" combi, which sounded like it belonged in Celine Dion's band. For ROM-based sounds, the Motif's Rhodeses kill anything out there. To get better you'd have to go with a high-MB RAM sample or Emagic's EVP-88, which is still in a different league.

ORGAN: Let's talk about Hammond organ, because that's all we care about, right? The Motif's Hammond sounds are good enough that I'd consider ditching my VK-7 for quickie gigs. The S-80's were passable, but the one time I did this I vowed never to do so again. Not so with the Motif. Again, the patches seem to contain plenty of genuine sonic information. And they got the accel and decel of the rotary effect down. I wasn't sure if I could hear this occurring separately for the virtual "low" and "high" rotors, though. On patches with Hammond percussion, they got the single-triggering right, too. Many allow fader control over "drawbars" like Kurz's KB-3 mode, though in a couple cases I had to cycle the fader through it's full travel before it "woke up"... not good if you're the kind of Hammond player who likes to effect subtle changes as the song goes on. Overall, these are damn good for sample-based B3 sounds, as good or better than those in the Emu B-3 module, and definitely ahead of the Triton.

STRINGS: The two boards were closer on this category. On solo acoustic string patches, the Motif had more pronounced bowing. Sometimes this was really beautiul, but for the most part it was hard to get around if you wanted to play legato. The Triton was a little more playable on this score. Once you got past the attack phase of the envelope, I thought the Motif had a LITTLE more realism going on... this is very subjective, but it seemed to me the Korg leaned heavily on the effects to mask that tile-bathroom quality samples often have. Aliasing in higher ranges was worse on the Triton. I was NOT impressed with the Motif's orchestral demo song "Symphonia." Everything had that wheezing accordian quality. The demo on my 10-year-old K2000 sounds better.

BRASS: I'm often called on to play tight, stacked brass riffs a la EWF or TOP. The Motif brass sounds fared better here, with more uniformity of attack between the extremes of the keyboard. Overall the Yamaha sounds were brighter, sometimes verging on harshness. I've heard it said that Triton sounds behave really well with regard to sitting in a mix etc. Again turning to the kill-the-FX test, I think this is because there isn't that much information there to begin with.

ANALOG SOUNDS: Didn't spend a lot of time here, or else I would have missed a studio date. Overall, the Yammy offered more of a selection of the sort of analog sounds I like, but they were too bright. Didn't find a lot to compare to on the Korg, which lacked both the MOSS card and any sort of PCM card devoted to analog synths. Most of the "synthesizer" style sounds I auditioned were either shimmery pads with lots of internal motion (in the O1/W tradition), or very geared towards hip-hop. Synth bass sounds on both boards were good. Both put out plenty of low end.

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS. Based on sound quality alone, I just preferred the Yamaha Motif. Also bang for buck is an issue: GC's prices, sans tax, are $1799 for the 5-octave Motif-6. A 5-octave Triton, by comparison, is $2399. The Motif, like it's brethren the S-80 and CS-6x, has an in-your-face quality that will often need to be tamed in a mix but is just the ticket for gigging in a pop, rock, or dance band. The Triton's sounds, by contrast, seem much more produced, as though somebody has already layered them into a good mix and you just happen to have all the other tracks muted. Under closer scrutiny, though, the Motif has more sonic integrity. YMMV.
[Edited 11/15/05 17:20pm]

WOW. Great info (if a bit over my head) .

I already have a Yamaha P250 so I have good piano sounds already.....

i'm really looking for good analog synth sounds like oberheim to do Prince/Time stuff from the 80s. ... plus good organs and string patches. It sounds like Motif is better for the latter....


but how about Oberheim stuff?

GaryMF said:

The "After 1984" patch nails it.

what about roland fantom ?