Over the past five years, in several thousand posts on Motifator.com, Yamaha US has never used the word "I" or expressed any personal opinions.

Well, I'm about to change all that !

Forums are about communicating information. Being the official representative of Yamaha on the web for Motif is an incredible responsibility and every word that is posted needs to be weighed carefully to be as clear and concise as possible in explaining Yamaha's position. There is also no room for subjective opinions.

But blogs are all about expressing personal viewpoints so here on my blog, I get to open up and and take a more personal approach to the community. I'll share stories about the development of the XS, behind the scenes looks at how we came up with some of the features and sounds and introduce you to some of the people who helped bring the Motif XS together.

NAMM is around the corner and we were working all day getting the booth setup . The biggest problem was that once we had the XS setup everybody wanted to show off the demos they had gotten ready for the show and so everybody would stop setting up to check out the newest tunes.

Blake had a killer jazz fusion tune where he got to whale out on electric guitar and Phil (Bad Mister) had a scarily accurate version of the Law and Order theme song complete with DX electric piano. It is pretty amazing how the XS really transcends sounding like a synth and just sounds like real music.

By the way , just to show you that now I ( see I said "I" again, and just did it again too - ad inifintum into loop mode.....) am going to be expressing myself honestly here, I totally agree with the forum members who thought the performance demos up on the European site did not have a lot of "wow".

But not to worry, we will be putting up audio demos and better yet video demos from the NAMM show in the next few days that we are sure are going to knock your socks off.

Stay tuned because the XS is going to be a very fun ride !!!