Keyboards/Synthesisers: Yamaha Motif ES8 Synthesiser

'Congratulations you have made a great choice with your purchase of the Yamaha Motif ES8 synthesiser. This product will provide you more hours of pleasure than any of our competitors' products you may have considered buying instead.'

Don't you love opening manuals (not that anyone actually reads them really do they?), and seeing a similar type of introduction? There is a good reason it is there however. Studies have shown that if you don't put this in as the first sentence of the manual 73% of people return their newly purchased piece of equipment without even attempting to use it. They just tend to get worried that they just shelled out a million bucks on a lemon.

Well this review is luckily an extra stop gap for those of us that don't read manuals and are considering buying this almost stupidly oversized mo'fo of a glorified tone generator. In short - in general you get what you pay for and the Motif at rrp $6995 is a prime example. Right, now we can get onto the synth itself.

First thing, this synth is big, it's like a million kilos (well, 28.3 kg actually), I almost ruptured my spleen carrying it up the stairs. It's not what you would call a beginner's synth, it's the real McCoy. Luckily I was able to call on a few friends to help burrow into the depths of this Amazon rainforest. So thanks to the skills of the ones like Ben (of Autozamm fame) and Chong Nee (who you might know from his work on Dei Hamo's 'We Gon Ride' single), we went and bought some scroggin and cut a path.

Patches that friendly robot Benzamm, Chris and Chong Nee recommend:

The Turkish patch - we had our very own Britney Spears Toxic rip off happening in under six minutes and subsequently managed to licence it for 'Now That's What I Call Music Vol 16' for a tidy sum. Choice!

The Unplugged Acoustic setting - now we all know that 99% of acoustic guitar samples sound crap, it's just the way it goes. Well luckily this puppy falls into the 1%, so it seems now that guitarists are going to go the way of the drummer did in the '80s. Hmmm.

The pianos are surprisingly good (another hard one to get close to the original).

Perhaps we should now look at what it actually does.

It's a workstation, yada, yada yada, and apparently it was used on the Lord of the Rings soundtrack for heaps of stuff.

So basically you get sounds from the pretty reasonable bank (over 1000) and can rejig them about until you too sound like the Neptunes or your local RSA band. Yes, this synth is that diverse.

The basic sounds are all 16-bit, which in this day and age seems a little stink until you realise that no one cares. That is don't tell and they won't know, righto.