Motif City

When I made the decision to sell sound libraries on Motif City, I decided every "Motif City Sound Pack" would have to: 1) Be best of class; 2) Offer musicians something unique; 3) Be inspiring and fun to play on the Motif.  So naturally I was delighted when I met Hugo of Goldbaby Productions. Hugo, like yours truly, is an analog drum machine aficionado. As such he has amassed an incredible collection of sound libraries recorded directly from legendary drum machines in glorious 24 bit sound.

In the case of the Motif City MPC60-808 Gold library, he painstakingly sampled an authentic Roland TR-808 drum machine into his beloved MPC60II drum sampler to create what I believe may be the fattest, crispiest, punchiest, and quite frankly DOPEST 808 samples ever.

To give you an idea of how excited I got when I first heard these samples, I emailed Hugo during his vacation and said, "We MUST get the MPC60-808 kit into Motif format!!" After all, I think we can agree the Motif comes up well short when it comes to analog drum sounds. But fear not, the days of thin, lifeless 808 drums are behind you. This drum kit is is the bomb!  click here for full details and sound demos!

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f you're looking to sell your music online, be sure to check out www.tunecore.com. They are a full service online music distributor that can get your music on all the major online sites. They claim to have delivered 575,000 songs so far, and say their members have been paid over $30,000,000 in royalties.  Their simple three step process looks like a winner! Enjoy!

Yamaha has upgraded the operating system for the XS line of keyboards. Highlights are below. The most significant enhancement is that you can now record your Performances directly to WAV format on USB media (only 16 bit @ 41khz but that will have to do). This is a major development for Yamaha. It doesn't quite satisfy my wishlist (the ability to export an entire pattern or song to individual WAV files), but it proves the XS's OS (MonteVista, an embedded Linux operating system -- you can read the original case study here: http://www.mvista.com/download/case_study_MontaVista_Linux_and_Yamaha.pdf) is more than up to the task. Then again, Yamaha wants everyone to own mLan and transfer via Firewire, so it may never happen. I will install this update tonioght and give it a whirl. I sincerely hope Yamaha has optimized the code and made the screen redraws faster. One of the things I adored about the Es was how fast the screens were. I miss that immensely..

In addition to the new OS, Yamaha has also updated the XS editor, too. Here are the links