I am curious about the arpeggios available in the motif even though I don’t use them except as factory sets in performances. I can understand the benefit more if a person were rummaging around within the 6000+ looking for possible song ideas. But suppose you were looking for a performance that fit a particular song with a certain beat.  A good example would be “ I’ll take you there” by the Staple Singers, or “Honky Tonk” by Bill Doggett?(among hundreds of others) Are they already there?  How would you find them among 6000 arpeggios.

Maybe I don’t really understand the arpeggios, and am trying to make them more than, or something that they are not intended to be.  Are many of them nearly the same as what we have heard over the years in various songs?  Can we expect that the beat from a song we are covering will be among the arpeggios just a finger touch away?

If they are there, what is the system for finding them? Are there copyright issues(with them being listed as related to certain songs)?

Of course, we can make these beats or play them as we are playing, but it would be handy if one could just call one up and stick it in a performance, fix it like they wanted to, and off they would go.(if they knew which one to call up)

summers - 02 February 2012 04:04 PM

I am curious about the arpeggios available in the motif even though I don’t use them except as factory sets in performances. I can understand the benefit more if a person were rummaging around within the 6000+ looking for possible song ideas. But suppose you were looking for a performance that fit a particular song with a certain beat.  A good example would be “ I’ll take you there” by the Staple Singers, or “Honky Tonk” by Bill Doggett?(among hundreds of others) Are they already there?  How would you find them among 6000 arpeggios.

Maybe I don’t really understand the arpeggios, and am trying to make them more than, or something that they are not intended to be.  Are many of them nearly the same as what we have heard over the years in various songs?  Can we expect that the beat from a song we are covering will be among the arpeggios just a finger touch away?

If they are there, what is the system for finding them? Are there copyright issues(with them being listed as related to certain songs)?

Of course, we can make these beats or play them as we are playing, but it would be handy if one could just call one up and stick it in a performance, fix it like they wanted to, and off they would go.(if they knew which one to call up)

You cant expect the Motif to read your mind,
or even to have the exact beat you need.

I think you answered your own question -
make your own beats for your songs.
Actually, for rock, country, jazz and pop, latin,
world music, anything that would call for drummer
on a drum kit, you need to make the entire
drum track. There is no way around that.

summers - 02 February 2012 04:04 PM

Are there copyright issues(with them being listed as related to certain songs)?

No.

And,you can also make your own arps. to fit your needs too..One feature the xf has that the xs doesn’t have is ending arps.So,I now make ending arps to fit what I’m doing..

XS arps are what they are. Yamaha have an amazing arp engine underneath the presets, albeit somewhat constrained by what it does. Within those constraints, it’s great.

Yamaha could do what Korg did ... unlock a bunch of it and give you hundreds of parameters, but then you’d have loads of users jumping up and down complaining about how complex it is.

Try programming some Karma patterns ... after this, the Yamaha arps seem positively embracing. I like Karma, it’s awesome, but not for the faint hearted.

Truth is, most users err on the side of ‘easy to use’. They want something that just works for them. Remember the old adage:

“Create a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it”.

Personally, I think Yamaha have struck a happy middle ground with their arp engine. The ‘put to arp’ feature is powerful indeed, but most users (I suspect) don’t even use that.

Listen to the arps in Daft Punk’s Tron soundtrack. Strike you as simple yet powerful? If you listen to that, it seems so straightforward ... but it’s a fantastic demonstration of what an arpeggiator can do. The vast majority of it (maybe all of it) could be done using the ‘put to arp’ function on the XS.

There is no substitute for musicianship, basically.

Df.

I am curious about the arpeggios available in the motif even though I don’t use them except as factory sets in performances. I can understand the benefit more if a person were rummaging around within the 6000+ looking for possible song ideas. But suppose you were looking for a performance that fit a particular song with a certain beat.  A good example would be “ I’ll take you there” by the Staple Singers, or “Honky Tonk” by Bill Doggett?(among hundreds of others) Are they already there?  How would you find them among 6000 arpeggios.

For that type of specific song making Yamaha makes a whole line of products called Arrangers - often as soon as a song is available as sheet music it is available as either a STYLE FILE or sound alike MIDI file - available for download to the product.

The Arranger keyboards lean towards doing cover material in an accurate fashion.
The Music Production workstation is as you surmised for people looking for song ideas for original compositions or for original versions/interpretations of other popular music. But you can do sound-alike projects on the Motif XS. (and with the Vintage (VCM) effects you can make it sound like the original recording)

An Arranger STYLE FILE is a basic backing ‘groove’ that can be used to recreate an specific song. All the Parts are linked together. So you will find STYLE FILES that are based on specific songs.
The Music Production synth presents arpeggio phrases as separate entities to inspire you to create your own original music.

It is a matter of the focus of the products. 

Maybe I don’t really understand the arpeggios, and am trying to make them more than, or something that they are not intended to be.  Are many of them nearly the same as what we have heard over the years in various songs?  Can we expect that the beat from a song we are covering will be among the arpeggios just a finger touch away?

Arpeggios in the Motif-series are designed to act as musicians that play a specific role. For example, the guitar arpeggios are intelligent from the stand point that when you voice a chord, it interprets your keyboard voicing and turns it into an appropriate voicing for a guitar.

So the Guitar arpeggios are like handing your chord chart chart to a guitarist - you do so in the real world because you probably don’t play guitar and you certainly can’t while you are sitting at the keyboard. So the guitar arpeggios in the Motif XS are to help you create realistic sounding guitar parts - in spite of the fact you may or may not know how to voice the chord for a guitar.

The Bass arpeggios as well can behave differently depending on what notes you challenge them with

The Drum arpeggios are probably the easiest to understand because most people understand that they don’t play drums and actually don’t really know how to make a realistic sounding drum groove (one where the drummer actually only uses four limbs at a time).
:-)
Also drum arps are easy to understand because they are “FIXED NOTE” - they play exactly the same every time whether you touch the trigger note or your cat jumps on the keys and hits that trigger note. They are not CHORD INTELLIGENT (because drummers don’t do chord changes)

But all of the arps, even the musical riffs and phrases can be manipulated in real time - and that is their real power. By adjusting the ARP PLAY FX (the Swing offsets, the Velocity Rate, the Gate Time, etc) you can bring entirely different personalities to the phrases.

In the coming weeks we hope to be having some musical examples of just what you can do with an arpeggio.

If you own a Motif XS and like the synthesizer aspects and you are thinking you want to really do these cover songs with accurate sound alike backing tracks… you can usually find most any song done as a Standard MIDI File. These can be loaded to the Motif-XS sequencer.

you can use part or all of the tracks as you may require. And since it is MIDI data you can use the PUT TRACK TO ARP function to turn it into an arpeggio - if that is what you want to do.

Visit http://www.yamahamusicsoft.com
Search under MIDI files - you can find most any song…

Wow..Can’t wait for the “musical examples” of just what you can do with an arpeggio..

Hi to all, if I can give you my opinion, Motif has a great Arpeggio engine, but as we can find in a lot of other synths or workstations, much preset are not what we really need. Now Arpeggios quality is excellent, but there are a lot of preset that are not so simply to use; I would not criticize those who made ​​the presets, but we must admit that many are simply parts of patterns and styles that can hardly be used alone. It would be very useful to have a manual which describes the original combinations of arpeggios for different families of instruments, for example which bass arpeggio presets sound better with some drums arpeggios etc.
I personally do not use much arpeggio presets because I prefer to create the arpeggio I need, especially when I have to play a cover.
What I’d like have in next Motif model, is a simply Arpeggio step editor, that may use the panel buttons as step selector, and knobs to edit them…
I was thinking that some guitar single strum arpeggios would not be bad…

Thanks Bad Mister for your detailed response and thanks to all that responded. Your responses provided good information.

Actually, the Motif XS provides what I needed in a keyboard.  Good quality, a good key-bed, good sounds, reasonable weight, and tweak-ability from the face of the board. The arpeggios just happened to be one of the features of the board. And to a certain extent, the performances(which I found to be a huge feature as I learned the board). A high quality keyboard that is almost an arranger.

So my thought was: “How can I use these things to help me in what I am doing?”. They are on this board. As I look at the performances, I see that they can be manipulated to suit my need, but there are many that I would never use.  I asked; “what if there were a Motif that already had performances heavily biased toward my style of music?”. Not a complaint, just a question.

The same applies to the 6000+ arpeggios. Could they be better depicted to carry the Motif further into arranger territory(since they are there).

I was not looking for a production keyboard or an arranger when I bought the Motif, but I thought I had stumbled upon a quasi arranger with this unit.

I have learned a lot about this machine and discovered the depth of its capabilities by means, to a great extent, of this forum. I have learned that I am trying to make an arranger out of a production keyboard. All this when I was only looking for a quality keyboard to play for performances.