Motif XS7 review - Sound, performance
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 21 Jan 2007

Sitting by this keyboard just made me realize that there's something strange going on with Yamaha these days. The first thing I noticed is very, very strange, and that's the way that effects are applied to actual sounds onboard. Let's say, you have a factory preset piano sound with reverb and a bit of damper and everything. Now, I hit a chord and hear this really nice piano sound that's very much ok, but then something strange happens. The effect that I hear in the background (reverb) brings quite a bit of noise to the front, and it actually disappears (noise and reverb) and you hear kind of raw sound. Now this is not a single program I'm talking about, I hear that pretty much on all of the programs I went through. And it gets worse - piano sound actually sounds even more strange when I hit a chord without the sustain pedal - like someone forgot to apply any kind of volume envelope on it. And overall, I got a feeling that someone was a bit too busy to play around with the EQ - many sounds "lack" EQ bigtime. This is especially easy to hear on Rhodes sounds. What's going on there?

Usually I really like what Yamaha does with acoustic sounds, pianos and alikes but this time it's the other way around. Pads that I tried sound very sweet and made me smile, but many other sounds are plain strange. Let's say, EP's, Rhodes, Wurliz' and stuff like that. They sound really great, but the effect thing just screws them up. Pipe-alike sounds are plain awesome to me. Just about everything you ever dreamed of and very versatile. Lead sounds are not so good, especially square-alike sounds. But it's when you get to horns, sax's and rest of the wind instruments where you're left with in the "I can't believe what I hear" phase. Some 90% of these sounds are sampled with "natural vibrato", which is cool, but not if whatever you do when you touch the keyboard has this vibrato glued to it, no matter if you play softly or hit the keyboard really hard. I actually like having a decent non-vibrato sound, and then apply vibrato via aftertouch or button or something.