I searched the manual, motifactor and goggle and couldn't find an answer......I understand there are dedicated keys above or below the normal guitar voicing range for special effects. Is there something to create the needed legato for a guitar hammer on or pull off? If its not built into a mega voice, can I edit my recorded notes to change velocity on certain notes to create it?

This was similar to the very conversation we were having at Yamaha when work began on the upgrade from the ES to the XS back more than ten years ago.

if you look at the Motif (classic) 2001 and Motif ES 2003 - they are constructed around a four Element Voice architecture, the XS and XF are constructed around an eight Element Voice architecture. The Xpanded (sorry) architecture was designed to address this very behavior. The big leap from the ES to XS was all about this musical behavior: articulations. The increase in a Elements (oscillators) was not used primarily to layer more tones, but to give Voices more realtime controllable articulations

The XA CONTROL is the main parameter that separates the Motifs XS/XF from the earlier Motifs. XA CONTROL is a setting that is made per Element and determines exactly "when" an oscillator will sound. Typically, in sample playback instruments you change articulations by VELOCITY... think "slap bass" as a perfect example: exceed a certain velocity the Voice will dynamically switch to the slap articulation. It's either-or, normal at velocities below a certain value and "slap" when you turn on a note higher than that value. Well all sample play synths can do that... XA CONTROL expands on giving articulation control to sample based sounds.

Yamaha tackled other articulations as well, so that they could be triggered by gestures or "how" you were playing. Legato play was one of the main ones they tackled. The blues guitar in the XS/XF has a picked attack if you play by attacking the note alone. If you play "legato" (trigger a new note before releasing the previous) however, the XS/XF will trigger the Element set to "XA CONTROL = legato". This is the blues guitar waveform *without* the plucked attack, the legato waveform is stored sans attack, it starts after the picked attack would have occurred. The XS/XF engine can seamlessly "knit" this legato sound so that the Hammer-on (that's what it's called) can occur and sound fully natural. The waveform without the attack sounds but when it comes in it is not "attacked" with a pick... It sounds exactly like a hammer-on. This is applied to guitars, saxophones, flutes, solo violin, etc. play normally you hear the normal attack, be it pick, breath, bow, etc, play a legato phrase and only the first note triggers that pick, attack, or bow stroke, the subsequent notes play without it. So instead of atack-attack-attack-attack, you get a phrase that sounds much more natural.

When you hear the arpeggios (another *mega* leap in that transition from ES to XS) they fully take advantage of these articulations. The MEGA GUITAR is structured with 8 Elements, each a different guitar articulation: body, mute, dead, hammer-on, slide, etc. the arp phrases are programmed to precisely trigger the correct articulation to make the phrases come to life. The ES had a couple of hundred arpeggios, the XS had more than ten times as many... Many take advantage of this new articulation feature.

At any rate, to pull off (sorry) the guitar hammer-on, will be difficult on the old Motif ES compared to doing it on the XS or XF or any of the newer MOXF, or S-series that feature 8 Elements.

Ok, so there are some hammer on pull offs built into few ES arpeggios BUT not these are not articulations that I can trigger playing a voice live, is that correct?.

One follow-up question about hammer on and pull offs. I understand that ES doesn't have enough elements/triggers to do it real time. However, is it, possible with MIDI for me to add/trigger it in latter, using perhaps pitch bend and/or reducing attack? I understand, it could be tedious depending on how many articulations to add/edit. I literally have only one 16 measure phrase that loops throughout a particular song with maybe 30 note pairing to legato bridge together. What do you think, is it possible and worth the effort to try?

You can definitely get what you are looking for using the later Motif synthesis engines... The biggest difference between the first two Motifs (Motif classic and ES) and the later XS/XF was the increase from 4 Elements to 8 Elements... The eight Element Voice architecture allowed for more articulations and in particular more guitar/plucked instrument articulations. The XA CONTROL (Expanded Articulation) feature was designed so that things like legato and legato based articulations could be performed in real time, and much more convincingly so.

With the ES you will need to manually access the particular waveform that most closely mimics the articulation you require. There are Mega Voices in the ES where at different velocities you will be able to trigger a precise articulation (the MegaVoice Arps take advantage of this).

But it is nothing like the real time performance articulations possible with the XS/XF engine where legato play actually switches to a different Element -an Element whose waveform does not include the plucked attack. So things like hammer-ons are much more realistic and play more intuitively.