I cant travel with my 88-key board so I’m looking at the ES6 As a shorter gig board. I’m embarrassed to say, I’ve never used MIDI although I understand the basics. My main concern about 61 keys is that I often play (live) layers and splits using deep range of the register for both voices, easily done on 88 keys. The only thing I can think of is to hookup two 61-key boards. I’d like to buy the ES6 and I love the drawbars. I already have a basic SY55 (61-key) I use for porting around to practices, so that could be my 2nd (external) board.

My questions:
1) If I hookup the ES6 to the 2nd board via MIDI, can I play Motif voices on both keybords at the same time?
2) If so, can I use the ES6 drawbars to control Zone volume on the 2nd board? can I even have a multi-zone voice send to the 2nd board?
3) Lastly, here’s the kicker- the ES6 is 128 polyphony and the 2nd board is only 16 polyphony. Does the 2nd board have to be same 128 to effectively play the ES6 voices, or does it just mean it will degrade the quality of output on 2nd board?

A ES7 would do the trick, but they seem to be a rarity like unicorns or something- nothing on the used market.

Thank you
Laura

Welcome to the forum.

Presuming that the SY55 is properly configured, its MIDI-Out connected to the ES6 MIDI-In, and the ES6 is in an appropriate mode…
1) Yes, the SY55 can play ES6 Voices at the same time the ES6 does.
2) The ES6 Control Sliders (which I assume you are referring to as “drawbars") can control volume of any of the Four Zones. (Sorry, I’m not sure what “can I even have a multi-zone voice send to the 2nd board?” means.)
3) The SY55’s polyphony determines only how many simultaneous notes can be played by its own internal tone generator. It doesn’t affect the number of notes that could be played via MIDI on the ES6.

This support article might be interesting, if you haven’t already seen it:
http://www.motifator.com/index.php/support/view/understanding_motif_es_master_mode