Last night (Thursday April 26) I attended the Los Angeles Motif XS event hosted by West L.A. Music and Yamaha.

It was truly an inspiring night. Sequences on the Motif XS8 were playing back through the large sound system (this was outdoors in a community amphitheatre right near West L.A. Music) and it really did sound like a band playing onstage.

The song "Satisfy", posted in the XS Listening Room, was written by myself and the vocalist on the track, Dyna Shirasaki. All the sounds on the track (with the exception of the vocals, of course) are from the XS.

The track itself is in the modern hard rock-pop vein, a la bands like Evanescense.

Here's a rundown of the sounds used:

1. Drumkit - Power Standard Kit 2
2. Bass - Pre3 B11 Prec Amped
3. Opening riff guitars and chunk gtrs on chorus -
Pre3 A10 HardRocker (2 Hand Gtr).
4. Stereo gtr lines during the chorus - User2 E13
Voodooman

Been some talk about new product demos lately. Actually, a lot of talk.

First things first - what are you listening to?

Mastering engineers (professionals with amazing ears who make a living polishing up tracks for CD's) will tell you that 95% of the systems people listen to are utter crap. And they're right.

Why doesn't someone come out with a keyboard that has a 200GB hard drive, the ability to run AU/VST software synths and samplers, onboard 16-track audio recording, VST/AU effects, waveform editing, and an onboard DVD-RW drive?

Can't be too hard in this day and age, right? We already have this on our computers, right?

Well, that's the point. We can already do these things with a computer. So, if you're sitting there reading this on your PC, why aren't you just using your PC to do your music?

Frank Zappa once said something like, "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture".

I've encountered people who said they heard no difference between what was on a cassette and what was on a CD. That made no sense to me - until I realized, they were thinking I was asking them if the music itself was different on the CD - were there any songs not included on the cassette, or were the CD versions of the songs different arrangements. They weren't referring to hiss or bass response or any technical aspects of the sound.

There's been a lot of discussion on the forums about "phat" filters. Fueled by a lot of posts from a certain you-know-who whose forum name begins with an "f".

I'm here to set the record straight. There is no such thing as a "phat" filter.

A lot of people will say that hardware synths sound better than software synths.

I disagree - I think that software synths usually sound better than hardware synths. Or should I say, I have a list of software synths that I think have raised the bar in terms of sound quality and presets. Native Instruments Reaktor5, B4II and Absynth3 sit at the top of my list, as do Arturia's minimoog V, WayOutWare's timewARP 2600, fxpansion's BFD, and Korg's Legacy colection.