Hi all,

I’m a proud owner of a MOXF 8 and I’ve recently purchased a 2Gb flash expansion card (Mutec FMC-07). I’m particularly interested in acoustic piano sounds. I’ve already intalled the CP-1 library which includes some very good piano patches, and I’ve seen that there are a few 3rd party commercial libraries for MOXF/Motif XF focused on grand piano sounds. Listening to the demos, all of them seem quite good, but I’d prefer to read the opinions of people who have purchased and used them in order to help me to decide. My main interest is classical piano.

Thanks in advance!

Since you already like the CP1:
http://www.motifator.com/index.php/forum/viewthread/471546/
Includes links to support articles on customizing piano Voices.

Some older reviews:
http://www.motifator.com/index.php/forum/viewthread/452414/
http://www.motifator.com/index.php/forum/viewthread/472233/
http://www.motifator.com/index.php/forum/viewthread/471816/

Although choice of piano Voices is both personal and very dependent on application, hopefully folks will post with their latest opinions.

Thank you very much for the links. Certainly, tweaking sounds can be very useful, although I would be more interested in libraries with more velocity layers, 88-key sampling and so on. My aim is trying to get the best possible acoustic piano sound for my MOXF.

shad0wfax - 08 May 2016 05:20 PM

Hi all,

. I’ve already intalled the CP-1 library which includes some very good piano patches,

!

There is no such thing as a “patch” on the MO XF, Motif, or any other Yamaha synth. A sound is either a single sound, called a “voice”, or a collection of up to four voices, which is called a “performance”.

A “patch” is a term referring to how a sound was created on modular synthesizers like the Moog Modular, where you literally “patched” cables from source jacks to destination jacks to
control the sound. These synthesizers look like the old telephone switchboards of yesteryear.

This is a modular synth:

http://www.moogmusic.com/products/modulars/system-55

Hi Dave,

Thanks for posting a reply. It’s an honor coming from such a good sound designer like you.

On the other hand, I already know that Yamaha does not use the term “patch”, but “voice” to refer to a single sound. But “patch” is a very common term to refer to sounds for any synth, not only modular ones, and not everybody uses exclusively Yamaha synthesizers. Other brands use “program” or “instrument” for the same concept. I think that (almost) everyone here understood what I meant in my first message. It’s like using different terms such as “performance” or “combination” to refer to multiple sounds together in a single set,either in the same or in different channels. I also know what a modular synthesizer is. Unfortunately, I’m quite old :(

That said, I’d love some comments about acoustic piano _voices_ ;)

Hi,

I also have the MOXF with the Mutec 2 GB board. I’ve loaded a number of different samples and third-party libraries on it.

The CP1 samples are pretty great, I particularly like the CFX grand which uses the same samples and was part of the Yamaha motif 40th anniversary package that you can still download on Yamaha.com.

For my Motif XF8, I picked up two of the 2 GB boards and loaded some pretty large samples onto it.  Basically I duplicated all my MOXF sounds on one of the boards and then I loaded the Alan Parsons Imperial grand, the keyboard waves CP70, and the Chick Corea Rhodes onto the other.

I’m not sure if you can get the Alan Parsons grand on this website, but the samples are pretty good, particularly if you want a large dynamic range.  The overall sound is not as bright as other pianos, but the detail when playing softly is pretty amazing. There are two options with it, a 1 GB sample or 1/2GB.

benj00 - 17 May 2016 10:10 PM

Hi,

I also have the MOXF with the Mutec 2 GB board. I’ve loaded a number of different samples and third-party libraries on it.

The CP1 samples are pretty great, I particularly like the CFX grand which uses the same samples and was part of the Yamaha motif 40th anniversary package that you can still download on Yamaha.com.

For my Motif XF8, I picked up two of the 2 GB boards and loaded some pretty large samples onto it.  Basically I duplicated all my MOXF sounds on one of the boards and then I loaded the Alan Parsons Imperial grand, the keyboard waves CP70, and the Chick Corea Rhodes onto the other.

I’m not sure if you can get the Alan Parsons grand on this website, but the samples are pretty good, particularly if you want a large dynamic range.  The overall sound is not as bright as other pianos, but the detail when playing softly is pretty amazing. There are two options with it, a 1 GB sample or 1/2GB.

Thanks for your reply. I agree that the CP1 samples are great. BTW, are you sure that the CP1 library uses samples taken from a CFX? I thought that they came from a CFIIIS, and that the only Yamaha digital keyboards that used CFX samples were the CP-4 and the Montage. I haven’t listened to either, but from the videos it seems that the CFX voices sound even better that those sampled from the CFIIIS.

Thanks also for your advice regarding Parson’s Imperial Grand.

Hi,

My mistake, it’s the Motif 10th Anniversary pack by Wojtek Olszak. It has some Voices named CFX Grand, CFX layer etc. They use the CP1 samples but I believe they are edited to sound like a CFX grand.

This pack also has some nice CS80 Samples/Voices.

I ended up buying Synthogy’s American Steinway D grand piano library. It’s a bit on the expensive side, but I’m quite happy with it. The tone is warm, detailed and beautiful, and the dynamics are impressive (8 layers). This actually causes to me sometimes a bit of trouble because due to my rather poor playing technique the sound is not as “consistent” (i.e. some notes playing quite louder than others) as when I play a piano voice with less layers. I hope that I’ll be able to improve this a bit by tweaking the parameters. But all in all, it’s a good buy.

shad0wfax - 05 July 2016 08:25 AM

I ended up buying Synthogy’s American Steinway D grand piano library. It’s a bit on the expensive side, but I’m quite happy with it. The tone is warm, detailed and beautiful, and the dynamics are impressive (8 layers). This actually causes to me sometimes a bit of trouble because due to my rather poor playing technique the sound is not as “consistent” (i.e. some notes playing quite louder than others) as when I play a piano voice with less layers. I hope that I’ll be able to improve this a bit by tweaking the parameters. But all in all, it’s a good buy.

Try setting the velocity response curve to soft, see if that helps

motidave - 05 July 2016 08:35 AM

Try setting the velocity response curve to soft, see if that helps

Indeed, the global Velocity Curve setting (page 141 of the Reference Manual) might help.

If you want to affect only one particular Voice, on a per-Element basis, see the Level Velocity Sensitivity Curve setting (page 44 of the Reference Manual). Other Velocity Sensitivity settings shown there might also be useful.

5pinDIN - 05 July 2016 09:55 AM

motidave - 05 July 2016 08:35 AM

Try setting the velocity response curve to soft, see if that helps

Indeed, the global Velocity Curve setting (page 141 of the Reference Manual) might help.

If you want to affect only one particular Voice, on a per-Element basis, see the Level Velocity Sensitivity Curve setting (page 44 of the Reference Manual). Other Velocity Sensitivity settings shown there might also be useful.

5Pin’s approach will definitely work and you can tune velocity response as exact a response as you want.

Here’s Option 3 and I think this exhausts my ideas: if you put the Voice in a Performance you can change the velocity sensitivity of each Voice individually at the Performance level.  (and you can have a one-voice Performance).  I don’t recall if you can select the global velocity curves but I know you can flatten the response to key velocity of each Voice individually as I’ve done that on many Performances for various reasons.

Thanks a lot for your help.

I’m not interested in modifying the general velocity curve, but just this particular sound, so I’ll try to change the relevant parameters of the different elements of the voice.