On Friday night at the NAMM show the Motif XS sound design team in the US got together at a trendy Japanese restaurant by South Coast Plaza not far from the show to celebrate the completion of the Motif XS voicing. Unfortunately I couldn't join them. Sound designers are some my favorite people to hang out with. Since my days as the head of sound design and product planning at Korg Inc in Japan working on products like the M1, 01W, and Wavestation, sound design has been a passion for me.

I thought you might want to know who these crazy guys are who spend their time making all the sounds that go in our boards. They are a great team - each with their unique strengths and focus which is why the Motifs appeal to a lot of different people.

People on the site are most familar with Dave Polich because he posts on the forums often and his sounds are available in MotifMart.

Dave has a completely unique approach to sound design and is always coming up with sounds that we can never figure out exactly how he made them. He just finished a complete guide to programming Motif which will be available on the site soon. Dave loves sound effects and weird stuff ! He has been contributing to Yamaha synth products for years.

Scott Plunkett is another one of the key people on the Motif team.
Scott has played keyboards with Boz Scaggs, Don Henley, Stevie Nicks, Micheal McDonald. He is currently on tour with Chris Isaak. He always manages to plan his touring dates to start right at the same time as the final selection session for sounds in the new Motif so we have to scramble to re-arrange schedules !

Scott is the one who programs many of the pianos , EPs, brass, strings and organs sounds. He and Johaness from the Germany progam team have very different approaches to sound design and you can often see two versions of an EP, organ or brass sound - one by Scott and one by Johaness. They are both great sound designers, but take very different approaches to velocity and EQ. So next time your at your Motif or ES see if you notice the different styles of programming that are in there.

Here's a funny story that happened when we were working on the ES. Scott was working on sound design for the ES and he had one of only 8 prototypes we had in the US. He was also rehearsing at a rental studio for the next Stevie Nicks tour. Somebody broke into the studio and stoled a huge amount og gear including the prototype ES. We were panicked because protos are really , really expensive. But two days later we got a call from a Yamaha dealer in LA who was trying to find our what this Motif ES thing that somebody was trying to trade in for cash was worth because he hadn't ever heard of it !. Thanks to the dealer we were able to get the ES proto back and Scott finished his work and the rock demo for the ES while on tour with Stevie.

You can read alot more about Scott at this web site with some nice pictures of his Motif ES on tour.

http://www.nicksfix.com/band_scott_plunkett.htm

One of the other key people on the XS project was new to the Motif team, Joe Ierardi of Synthogy. Joe was the head sound designer for Kuzweill for many years and now runs Synthogy, the company that developed Ivory. He is one of best people in the world at high quality sampling of acoustic instruments. He worked on the original Kurzweill orchestral ROM block.

So we got him to work on the XS to help us put together completely new strings, woodwinds and other orchestral sounds. When we did a survey on the site about 2 years ago , orchestral sounds were the top request. Joe, Scott and Geoff Stradling, an LA TV composer worked incredible hours on sampling, processing and programming and we think the XS will set a new level for on board orchestral sounds . Plus we have a lot of data left over that we hope we will be able release as options.

There are lots more people to tell you about- Ohgai-san, Murata-san and Ito-san and the rest of the Japan team, Martin Harris and his European team that worked on the arps and Ken and Ben at Yamaha US who manage all the insanity, but it's getting late and after four long days at NAMM, it's time to call it a night.

Oyasumi Nasai !