The best musical instruments start with top-quality sounds, and the S90 XS delivers all that — and more. The S Series features all the Voices, Performances, arps and Virtual Circuit Modeling effects found on the flagship MOTIF XS Music Production Synthesizer. Plus we've added a huge 142 megabytes dedicated exclusively to high-quality piano waveforms, for a total of 456 MB of instrument samples.

Foremost among these new piano sounds are the new samples taken from Yamaha's world-renowned S6 concert grand piano. These fully capture the richly textured sound of that wonderfully expressive instrument, and provide a warm concert grand piano sound unavailable on any other keyboard. For variation, the MOTIF XS piano based on a Yamaha CFIIIS is also available.

Conventional keyboards in the past had their sounds designed primarily for the listener. This time, however, our development team set out to primarily satisfy the player instead. We reasoned that when the performer hears and experiences the best possible sound, the performance would be the best possible, too! The result? The S90 XS is a genuine musician's instrument, one that truly inspires and stimulates the live performer as well as the music creator and arranger.

The S90 XS also lets you quickly and conveniently create your own custom Performances, with the amazingly fast and easy Performance Creator feature. It's never been easier to select a Voice, then quickly program Layers and Splits — even assigning a Drum Voice complete with arps to create your perfect Performance.

Let's say that you're playing a piano Voice and you want to layer a string sound on top of it. Simply press the [LAYER] button, then select the desired Voice category and Voice, and store your new Performance — just a few button presses and you're there!

The S90 XS gives you comprehensive, easy-to-use controls for your Performances as well—such as Octave and Transpose buttons for quickly changing the pitch, and a Tap Tempo button that lets you easily change the tempo of Arpeggio or MIDI sequence playback on the fly. You can assign virtually any parameter on the instrument to one of the Assignable Function buttons (using the S90 XS Voice Editor) and switch the parameter as you play — for example, turning specific sound elements of a Voice on or off. Moreover, the instrument lets you route a click sound to one of the assignable outputs. With this you could let your drummer hear just the click sound and lock into your Arpeggio or MIDI playback.

The S90 XS has a host of other features that live performers will appreciate — such as the combo input jack that accepts both mic and instrument input. Simply plug in a microphone or guitar, tweak the INPUT GAIN knob (while checking the convenient PEAK lamp), and you're all set! Plus, you can use the Control Knobs to finely adjust the volume and even directly apply reverb or chorus to the sound.

In the heat of live performance, the last thing you want is to have to search for a much-needed panel control—or worse yet press the wrong button and get a rude, unexpected sound change. That's why all the panel controls of the S90 XS have been designed and positioned for optimum, intuitive operation, especially for live performance. For example, you can quickly select a Part, turn it on/off, set Arpeggio on/off, switch Arpeggio Hold — all done easily with the top panel controls — and instantly tweak important sound parameters like reverb, filter and sustain via the Knobs and Sliders. And to prevent that dreaded sound change, there's a convenient Panel Lock button that instantly disables (or enables) the panel controls.

If you've got a USB memory stick or thumb drive, you can plug it into the S90 XS and record your performance as audio data. This remarkable feature lets you instantly capture what you play on the keyboard—including arpeggio playback—to your USB device. If you've connected a microphone or guitar, you can even record your singing or playing as well. You can also record audio directly to the internal flash memory (192 MB) built into the instrument, without the need of a memory stick.

And keep in mind that anything you've recorded to the memory stick, even audio files created on your computer, can be played back on the S90 XS — which means you can create your own custom audio backing tracks and perform along with them on the S90 XS. For example, you can create a basic song track beforehand, then sing and solo over it during your performance. Or add guitar parts and vocal harmonies to be played back with your live performance. There's also a useful Song Chain function that lets you string together separate recordings and create a convenient backing track "set list" for your gigs.