I used my Motif XF7 for the first time at a live performance and am VERY enthused for the future.

See: http://www.archive.org/details/bajadunes2011-12-03.sbd.r16.flac24

(see attached screenshot for how to “listen” to the gig).

I have an XF8 that stays in the studio and I build up our arrangements on it and then transfer them to the XF7 and the XF7 “goes on the road” so to speak and is used live.

The performance, sound quality, and overall “fun factor” of the XF7 as a replacement to the “arranger” series (in my case, the PSR-S700) far far FAR exceeded my expectations.

ALL sounds you hear in this live performance recording are coming from the Motif XF7 EXCEPT:

1.  Electric/acoustic guitar in the left hand hemisphere of the stereo spectrum (listen with in-ears and you’ll detect this better).  This is Lee Ford on guitar.

2.  Acoustic guitar in the right hand hemisphere (very occasionally).  This is Kevin B. Selby on a Dean acoustic guitar.

Kevin B. Selby built all arrangements and played ALL parts EXCEPT the basic drum patterns that were provided EITHER by Styles (coming from PSR-S700) or arps on the Motif.  Soooo…all bass lines, string arrangements, horns, keyboard chordal comping parts, etc., were either performed live or recorded into the Song arrangement beforehand.

I stayed mainly in Song mode and kept the typical Drums, Bass, Keys, Strings/Horn backing tracks down on Tracks 1 through 4 (or sometimes as much as 1-6).  Starting at Track 7 and all the way to Track 16 I have the Voices that I will use “live” (in other words, I’m playing these Voices during the song and switching between them sometimes switching sounds in the middle of the song).  I routed Tracks 1-6 out the main outs and turned all Insert effects for those tracks OFF (because I wanted to save the Insert effects for the live tracks).  I routed Tracks 7-16 out the Assignable Outputs so I could separate them sonically from the main backing “band”. 

I routed the Main outs to Tracks 7/8 of a Zoom R16.

I routed the Assignable outs to Tracks 5/6 of the R16.

I then had three vocal mic’s on Tracks 1, 2, and 3 and finally I mic’d the guitar amp (Traynor) with a Shure 57 and routed it into Track 4 of the R16.

8-track recording of a trio.  Not bad.

See next post for more detail.

Kevin B. Selby
http://kevinselby.com <-- Peaceful Music
http://facebook.com/BajaDunes <-- Live Performance

Click thumbnail to see full-size image

Some songs to note:

Chitlins Con Carne (Track 13) was done in Pattern mode and I simply bounced back and forth between two main Sections and then switched to a final Section that ended the song.  When in Pattern mode, you lose a little of the capability for the drums to sound like a real drummer (because any drum fills you program are going to be the same every time you move to a particular section repeatedly).  But in this particular case, for live performance, it is “good enough”.  Would I ever allow this type of drum “performance” to be on a studio album?  Absolutely not because it’s too simplistic.  But again, for live performance it’s definitely “good enough”.

It’s Too Late (Track 1) represents my initial forays into going from Pattern mode to “chaining” the Sections together to create a Song.  I never went back and redid the drum fills, so you’ll hear the same drum fill occurring several times.  Similar to Chitlins above, it’s probably “good enough” for live performance, although, I should point out, that one of my huge goals in life is to build songs for live performance wherein the average listener cannot tell that we have no real human drummer.  A tall order I realize, but the technology is basically there and we may as well use it.

Spooky (Track 27) was a Song built from absolute scratch on the XF8 from stock drum pattern arps as well as all the wonderful Voices of the XF8.  Similar to It’s Too Late above, I started in Pattern mode (so I would have the most flexibility going forward) and once I “chained” the Sections together into a cohesive Song, I then specifically used the Real Time Loop Remix (RTLR) feature to make all the drum fills variations of themselves.  This way the song sounds like a real drummer’s drum “performance” from start to finish.  This song shows the power of the Motif to completely build a credible song either for studio work or for use in backing up a band.  Is it overkill for live performance?  Possibly.  On the other hand, I CAN tell you that as a musician playing against it, it was waaaaay more fun and more “real” to play against than any of the other songs.  There’s that “fun-factor” cropping up.

Do It Again (Track 3) is a perfect example of an “in-betweener” in terms of what I had to do and it involved “painting” the drum track with drum arps of the Motif whereas the other tracks were from the PSR song.  I didn’t have time to go add drum fills (using RTLR similar to Spooky above), but I will when I have time.  Being able to quite literally “paint across” a track with beautiful stock drum arps on the Motif was a much needed capability and I’m very glad the designers thought of this.

All other songs were “ported” over from the PSR-S700.  That experience is worth its own forum post, but suffice it to say that I was mildly surprised at how well they worked on the Motif once I figured out how to strip the MIDI files coming from the PSR of ALL “sysex” events and any other extraneous events (bank changes, program changes, controllers, etc.).  The key is to get your MIDI files (also referred to as SMF) as “squeaky clean” as you can get.  Some songs “ported” over extremely well.  Others, not so well (Do It Again had a gnarly drum track that was designed for a different drum kit and thus I needed to “paint” over it (see previous paragraph).  I used the Track Effects in some cases to push up the Velocity of the drum track (for some reason, the arranger series (PSR) deliberately have lower velocity drum tracks than most.

I’ll write up another post to discuss the fabulous voices and my thoughts.

Am I done with these arrangements?  Absolutely not.  I have about 3 pages of notes of things to “fix” on the various arrangements.  I may completely rebuild some of them from scratch on the Motif.  Others are “good enough” for now.

I am extremely enthused (to say the least!) about where this band (and my own original music) can go as we move into the future.
Long live the Motif!

Sincerely,

Kevin B. Selby
http://kevinselby.com <-- Peaceful Music
http://facebook.com/BajaDunes <-- Live Performance

A few more interesting statistics and/or tidbits.

To build the Song “Spooky” up to what you heard took right at 2 hours.  This is because of the time spent learning how to use Real Time Loop Remix (RTLR) and then painstakingly creating all those drum fills and documenting (in a Word doc) where I put them and what RTLR settings I used in case I ever wanted to go back and change ONE fill (for example).  The results are WELL worth the 2 hours.

I didn’t attempt to mixdown the live performance “to perfection”.  I did my typical “get it good enough” mixdown.  As such, you’ll definitely hear some sections of songs where, for example, Lee’s guitar could be louder, or the B3 I’m playing could be adjusted in the mix.

On Gimme One Reason, the acoustic piano you hear is TOO FREAKING LOUD.  It’s a pre-recorded track where I just tried to lay down a simple chord structure that we could play over.  Some may argue that we could probably mute or erase ALL of these “comping” parts and stick with Drums, Bass, and the occasional Strings or Horns.  You are probably right.  But for now, I’ll keep them in there, adjust their dang volume levels and go from there.  Might start muting them as we get into the future.

This was the SECOND live performance with my XF7.  The first performance was 2 days earlier and while the recording turned out okay, there were enough “oh dang” moments that I just never bothered to mix that particular gig down.

It will probably take another 2 solid months of gigs (that’s like about 6-8 performances) for me to be completely comfortable with using the XF7 SOLELY for live performance.  It will be interesting to see how Baja Dunes sounds in a year after we’ve possibly reworked the arrangements, added new tunes, figured out additional capabilities of the XF7, etc.

Here’s a for instance:
I FULLY plan on arranging “Funky Town” complete with routing Katie’s vocal into the XF7 and using vocoder.  HECK YEAH!

Oh...in another post, I’ll analyze and discuss my choice of voices including some of the amazing Dave Polich voices from Bees Knees and Vintage Keyboards.  We actually have songs on our list (Green Eyed Lady, Black Magic Woman, and Green Onions to name a few) that are ON our list specifically because of the organ patches programmed by Mr. Polich.  They are so realistic that they inspire you to want to perform the particular song they were programmed for.  Sigh...life is good.

What else...um...I still need to fuss with the keyboard velocity curve.  I find it to “breathe” a little too much on the acoustic piano patches.  In other words, I need to tone down the “range” of the velocity because I can go from absolute whisper quiet to SCREAMING LOUD SFORZANDO in about a millisecond.  That’s fine and well and good for studio work where you WANT that, but for live performance, I want a more subtle response curve so I’m not so wildly different.  I might experiment with some compression to help me out a little.

OH...I used the Stage reverb on most tracks to give them a little “room” to live in.  I also use a tad bit of standard Chorus on the Bass track and usually the Rhodes and/or Strings/Horns track.  Not a lot...but a little.  I don’t want a TON of reverb dripping off the walls, so I hunted around for an all-around general purpose “stage” reverb.  I’m not at the keyboard right now, so I can’t tell you specifically which patch it is.

Tracks 7-16, by going out the Assignable outputs receive NO general overall reverb/chorus from the Motif, but they DO get a splash of reverb (again, a “stage” type patch) from within Sonar X1 Essentials (which is what I use to mix down all 8 tracks of the .wav’s coming from the R16).

More later.

K

Few more tidbits before I actually write down the patches that I used (in case anyone cares).

On Chitlins Con Carne (Track 13), at 4:09, you can hear a distortion guitar in the right hemisphere.  That’s me on the XF7 using one of Dave Polich’s patches from Axxe.  It’s a “Santana-esque” patch and I can’t remember the name of it right now.  I’ll get that for you.  Obviously I need to work some more on playing guitar from a keybed.  But for the first time out on that patch, it was definitely fun!

Both the XF8 and the XF7 have a 1 Gb flash board (at FL1).  They currently only have the Chick Corea Rhodes Mark V sample library loaded.

Most of the Rhodes you hear at the LMA link are the Chick Corea Mark V Rhodes.  I’ll use Wurlitzer in other cases to help round out the sounds.

Any horn patches you hear are the patch “Lots O’ Brass” (PRE4/G05).

Ain’t No Sunshine uses a cool string quartet (either PRE4/A09 or A10) and has a great sound similar to the original by Bill Withers.

Hammond B3 organs are varied, but the main one is a stock patch from Yamaha called “On Road AS1” (PRE1/F11).  I really like how you can turn up the “grit” on the Leslie (distortion) and it responds.  Anything else would be the “Black Magic” and/or “Key Click 1” or “Vintage” B3’s from Bees Knees.

Acoustic Piano was always Full Concert Grand.  It’s got a great “ringy” sound.  I found though, that whenever Full Concert Grand was used in a pre-recorded track in a Song, it almost has too much mid-range/bass for the mix I’m trying to get.  So I’ll probably throw an Insert EQ on it in those cases and pull out the mids and lows.

I just didn’t have enough time to thoroughly “vet” all the sounds I wanted to use (too busy getting the arrangements and Songs ported over and all that).  In the coming months I’ll listen more intently to the various patches and determine what to put in my little “arsenal” of Voices.

I noticed that the Natural Grand S6 has an almost “woody” sound (like a Steinway) and I think this particular voice would be PERFECT for traditional jazz and possibly some fusion.  I “hear” Vince Guaraldi on this particular voice.  I can also see using this voice for “Cantaloupe Island” (Herbie Hancock).

A brief paragraph or two on where I’m going musically:

The trio Baja Dunes is more of a 70s vocal “feel good” type of band where we tend to stay in the 70s/80s, but occasionally come up to the 90s and today for some certain hit songs.  I will continue working with this trio and arranging new songs and all that because what we have seems to work and heck, it’s fun arranging for a female vocalist.  She slays me with her Linda Ronstadt and Carole King.

I’m ALSO working in a different band with a fellow named Norm Karin (jazz guitar) and we want to explore more jazz fusion and/or smooth jazz instrumentals (with an occasional 70s vocal or jazz vocal thrown in to keep things interesting).  Right now unfortunately, we’re still trying to “break away” from the Baja Dunes setlist.  My goal is that within 1 year (or sooner), you wouldn’t necessarily even know that I’m the main arranger behind the two different bands.  We also want to create arrangements of the songs on Palouse (see: http://kevinselby.com/palouse) as well as start writing new material in that vein and begin performing that stuff. 

Then there’s the solo piano album and another follow-up to Palouse I need to do in the studio.

In all cases, my hope is that I can “realize” or “render” all of the material we need for these various projects using just the Motif XF.  I think it would be a testament to exactly how high level these keyboards are.

So anyway...now you know my life story.  Go listen to the gig at the Live Music Archive (URL in the first post of this thread) and enjoy!

Kevin B. Selby
http://kevinselby.com <-- Peaceful Music
http://facebook.com/BajaDunes <-- Live Performance

Two more gig URL’s and then I’ll leave this thread alone (promise!).

Another Baja Dunes gig recording:
http://www.archive.org/details/bajadunes2011-12-10.sbd.r16.flac24

This has Little Wing and Wonderful Tonight on it and they sound fairly decent (although I still have to go back and add more detailed drum fills...but you get the picture).

Kevin Selby Experiment:
http://www.archive.org/details/kse2011-12-07.sbd.r16.flac24

This one has a decent rendition of Cantaloupe Island (with the S6 acoustic piano).

Anyway...now you have some reasonable recordings to listen to that showcase what you can do live with the XF.  And of course, just a reminder: I haven’t even TOUCHED Master, Performance, or Voice mode.  I’m “living” strictly in Song and Pattern mode.

Kevin B. Selby

Wonderful, Wonderful, Wonderful!!!!!!!!!!

I liked “Chain of Fools”.

Great job!!!!!!

Thank you for posting all this detail. It shows what can be done with the hardware. As a new MOX8 owner, I am very much feeling my way here, and this gives me some pointers!

Thanks for the comments folks.  Glad it helped as that was my intent.

A tad more followup:

Stayed up until midnight last night performing various “fixes” to my arrangements.  A lot of the fixing was me using Real Time Loop Remix (RTLR) to add drum fills at various points in the songs.  I still cannot get over how cool this is.  It’s like having a Tyros or PSR “arranger” type keyboard but with thousands of variations on the fills.  Too cool.

Also am getting more familiar with the XF interface in terms of making tiny fixes to single measures and/or phrases.  The engineers truly make it extremely powerful to make very detailed “surgeries” to your MIDI event data and that is ALSO too cool.  Was able to pull velocity down on a single measure where a drum fill came in “too hot” and make that particular measure blend better with the rest of the drum performance.

Also getting better at blending sounds together on the various tracks to create a cohesive “whole” song that simply rocks!

Baja Dunes has TONS of work ahead of it in terms of new songs and I’m eager to spend the last week of December working up these new tunes.

Anyway...great times!

Kevin B. Selby

I enjoyed most of your stuff K-very nice!!!!

In doing scratch tracks-have you tried some of the built in drum arps?In “performance” you can just

go from s1,2 etc and have some nice variations in a live situation.

On your XF;there’s a performance called “Late Nite Band” H 12 or 13? that might fit in what you’re doing.As soon as i get the patch map-want to add it to my XS.

Keep up the good work-the “oldies are IN”.I’m working on a few old tunes ;Will it go round’ in circles (B Preston);Music-Queen on my soul( AWB),Keep on-keep that same old feelong