Again, with Yamaha’s synth pedigree you’d expect greatness in the synth strings department and you won’t be disappointed. The strings in Bank 4 maintain the ‘acoustic first, synthetic last’ theme and here’s where the 128 notes of polyphony might come into play – indeed, I managed to build up a fairly convincing orchestral piece pretty quickly by stacking up several of the more traditional presets. The assignable knobs to the right of the screen come into their own here, with the first two automatically assigned to filter cutoff and resonance for any more dramatic squealing you might require. The basses in Bank 3 move similarly from acoustic to electric before hitting synthetic, with the likes of a wonderfully fat Chill Out Bass preset through some surprisingly gnarly acid basses – several assigned to arpeggiations – and some impressively fat dance basses. The organs continue into Bank 2, which switches to a percussive theme with some incredibly clean and punchy bells and world instruments before a super-impressive set of guitar presets that go from crisp acoustic to heavy electric over the course of about 90 presets, with the latter often bringing in more distortion as you hit the keys harder. There are some great nods to Yamaha classics, with lots of DX and the odd TX-based presets plus some fine, swirling organs and distorted keyboards, too. We start with Keys and all of the expected and impressive pianos – acoustic, electric, you name it. The presets are split across a mighty nine banks – 128 per bank. Also included are re-creations of two classic Yamaha pianos (a CFIIIS and an S6), so there should be plenty on offer here for both traditional keyboard players and synth-heads. That’s 136 more presets than the original, with more traditional piano and orchestral sounds alongside more modern hip hop sounds. The Engine As we’ve already said, the heart of the synth is the XF engine, so you get 741MB to play with delivering 1,152 presets and 256 performances. Mind you, things have certainly moved on since I spent that student grant… Or alternatively, stack up its onboard sequencer, effects, 16 parts of multitimbrality and massive 128 notes of polyphony and you could look at it as the ultimate in standalone hardware workstations. With USB audio and MIDI and the ability to control a supplied suite of software (including Steinberg’s Cubase AI 7 and Prologue synth VSTi), you quickly get the computer angle – this could be the one keyboard you need to slot in alongside your laptop. Indeed, the MOXF on test here – the latest incarnation of the synth workstation – is designed to do just that, because as well as working standalone it could also sit at the heart of your computer studio.īest of Both Worlds? The new MOXF range (the 6 on test here has 61 semi-weighted keys the 8 has 88 fully weighted keys) is notable in that it has the MOTIF XF sound engine – ie, the top-of-the-range technology from the MOTIF range – plus optional Flash memory (up to 1GB) to load in your own sounds or some of the many available collections that have been released by Yamaha and third-party companies over the years (see Flash Extras box for more on this). Of course, now we seem to have reached a happy medium whereby hardware synths sit alongside the best of software. And that’s a decade that has seen software synths come and, for a while anyway, challenge hardware’s dominance in the area. The Japanese giant must have been doing something right with its MO series as it’s been selling these – in one form or another – for well over a decade (see A Little MO history box for more). Yamaha is now one of the leading players in the field. Things have moved on, though, and today’s workstations are like alien technologies by comparison.
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