Here’s a quick follow up after my interview with Yamaha marketing.

First, the word “conversation” is a better description than “interview.” I had a really enjoyable, high-bandwidth conversation with fellow gear-heads. What could be better than that? The Yamaha team members are friendly, extremely knowledgeable and open. They are also good listeners and had read my pre-interview MOX retrospective.

So, thanks to Yamaha for listening!

I also learned some things that I intend to put into practice going forward. We discussed how I created the voices that I use on my church gig and the issue of sound dropping across voice changes in MOX Voice Mode. One way to avoid sound cut-off is to use Song Mode instead of Voice Mode. Assign a voice to each part in Song Mode and then select parts on the fly. I’ll have to give this a try. I also want to experiment with the assignable knobs for drawbar control and Song Mode may be part of this solution, too.

Since the conversation was relatively short — about 25 minutes with my MacBook Air crashing due to a thermal overload part way through (Yikes!) — I went blank on some of the reasons and history for my work style. For example, I created the voices for the church gig through the front panel and didn’t use either the PC- or iPad-based editors. I since reconstructed my mind-set from way-back-when. I’m sure that I was sooooo anxious to use the MOX at the gig that I just dove into the front panel. I had programmed a TG-500 back in the day and the Yamaha voice architecture was still familiar to me. (The Motif/MOX effects structure is way easier to understand than the old TG, thankfully.) The last thing I needed was a software editor to get between me and the gig!

I didn’t have an iPad when I bought the MOX6 and wasn’t aware of the Yamaha apps for Motif/MOX. The apps — once I learned about them — motivated me to budget for and to buy the iPad. Aside from Web-browsing and e-mail, my iPad is almost entirely devoted to music-making tools (no cat videos). I have both Cubasis and Mobile Music Sequencer (MMS) installed. MMS gets used; Cubasis not so much. Cubase is one of those tools that I want to learn — kind of like my current explorations in Ableton Live.

Starting today, I would use the iPad apps. Heck, I should (would) check out the Yamaha PC-based editor and the fine Motif/MOX tools by John Melas.

Well, there you have it. A positive experience all the way around!

If you’re curious about how I use the MOX for content creation, please check out the following posts and pages: