Motif City

mo-teef: A dominant theme, idea, or pattern in a work of art
Welcome to Motif City Sign in | Join | Help

Welcome! Motif City is the home of the Commanding the Yamaha Motif series of books and tutorials.
Featured Motif City News Article
Composing Music.. the Marvel Way
Hello again. Long time, no see! Hope everyone is well. Unfortunately I haven't made the time to update the site in a while. Family, summer, work, all those things have pushed Motif City down the list of priorities. Hopefully that is changing now as the kids head back to school (whew!)

I haven't written any music in quite some time. During my hiatus, I have been thinking about streamlining the song composition process. As a cartoonist and sketch artist, I often read books on drawing, anatomy, etc. I have read several over the summer. One that has really resonated is from the Marvel Comics team. Not only are they great cartoonists, they are great educators on the craft of cartooning. I own their DVD (Drawing Comics the Marvel Way), as...  Read more

Motif City News
  • Yamaha Motif XS6 Review - Better Late than Never

    [Note: this article is a bit long, and I only provide the gritty pre-XS details for the legions of people who are pondering the switch from workstation/drum machine-based composition  to software-based composition,.and vice versa]I finally picked...
    03-26-2008, 12:24 PM by Mark Johnston to Motif City
  • Cubase 4 & Studio Connections

    Well, I finally got around to testing Cubase 4 and Studio Connections with my Motif ES 8. I purchased a Core 2 Duo machine a ways back but had only used it for video editing for the most part. Now that things have settled down in my personal life I thought...
    03-14-2008, 12:05 AM by Mark Johnston to Motif City
  • Yamaha Announces Next Generation Motif XS

    Well, this is the day I have been waiting for. In all seriousness, I only had two requests of the next Motif: a bigger screen and an UNDO button. Looks like I am 1 for 2 as I am pretty sure Yamaha has failed to add one of the most fundamentally important...
    01-24-2007, 10:20 PM by Mark Johnston to Motif City
© JForce New Media, 2006, All Rights Reserved