Yamaha Motif

The Yamaha Motif is a series of music workstation synthesizers, first released by Yamaha Corporation in August 2001. The Motif replaced the EX series in Yamaha's line-up. Other workstations in the same class are the Korg Kronos, Roland Fantom G.

Original MOTIF series, now called "MOTIF Classic", were released in four variants in 2001:

MOTIF Rack is a sound module (with no keyboard) that is controlled by external MIDI instruments. It can be expanded with two Modular Synthesis Plug-in boards but has no sampling capabilities. The balanced hammer effect action is the same action found on Yamaha's S90 series keyboards. GHS (Graded Hammer Standard) action is the same action on Yamaha's high end digital pianos.

In January (2007), Yamaha introduced two "retro" models; the MM6 (61 keys) and MM8 (88 keys), both based on the original 2001 Motif sound set and samples, with polyphony greatly reduced to fit the lower specifications. This synthesizer comes default with 418 patches and 22 drum kits.

MOTIF ES, a successor to original MOTIF series, debuted at Summer NAMM Show in 2003:

In January 2006, Yamaha launched two entry-level variants of the MOTIF ES - the 61 key MO6 and 88 key MO8. Though containing half the polyphony and fewer preset sound programs, these models contain all the MOTIF ES sample sets, along with arpeggios and a song and pattern sequencer. Lacking are the professional MOTIF ES features such as mLAN connectivity, PLG integration, sampling and multiple foot controllers.

The XS versions were announced at NAMM 2007:

MOTIF has a mLAN connection for transferring MIDI and sound to a PC.

The MOTIF XS operating system is based on MontaVista Linux.

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