I’m diggin that Smart Morph feature on the Montage.  I like that touch sensitive approach to sound design and Dom does a good job demonstrating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd3aCDutC5s

But its gonna be a minute b4 I switch around my bank account and my studio to make room for the MoDX or a Montage.  So I wondered how close could the Motif even come to something like the Montage Smart Morph feature for sound design Hmmm.....????.

Well I:

1.  created an initialized voice
2.  I picked 5 elements that I wanted to play with (choir, saw,shaker, flugel horn, nylon guitar)
3.  I assigned the ribbon controller to all 6 ctlsets. I experimentally picked the control dest:
(resonance,E-LFO speed, HPF cutoff, coarse tune, key on delay, wet-dry for the Ring mod)

4.  I mixed, matched, and combined the elements in the ctlset matrix
5.  I experimented with the ribbon until I found the sweet spot
6.  With the ribbon controller parameter set to hold I went into ISS mode and sampled the sound and created a brand new element using the timbre at the hold position of the ribbon.

I played around with the concept a while and created some pretty interesting and useful voices! I experimented with loop remix, reverse, time stretch, and slice using the sounds I got using the ribbon controller and whoa!!!!, nice stuff at least to me.  By assigning the ribbon controller to manipulate 6 Destinations and assigning various elements to those destinations in the matrix, mission accomplished!  Close enough!

No of course the Motif does not have the visuals of the FM-X smart morph. No of course it does not use any machine learning.

But we can do FM and AM modulation synthesis and Subtractive synthesis on the Motif and assigning the ribbon controller to multiple parameters and multiple elements in the CTLSET within a single voice does allow you to morph up to 8 elements in any way you choose with each playing a potentially different role within the sound, all while taking advantage of XA Control, velocity programming, etc using the ribbon controller.  And you can use the ribbon controller in this way to design the sound that you’re looking for in your new voice.  And then you can sample that sound with the ISS using the resample feature.  And you can further make sound design changes using the sampler jobs.  So in this instance the Ribbon controller is used during the sound design process instead of as a performance controller.

Its not the same as the Montage’s Smart Morph.  But it does give Motif owners yet another approach to sound design and programming using the Ribbon Controller and ISS!