Studio : Samplers

Akai S950
Akai S3000XL

Until a few months ago I only used the S950. It had monphonic assignable outputs, a dodgy screen backlight and 1Mb of memory. For the last few years it hasn't even had a disk drive. I didn't know about sample editors or AkaiDisk until I started looking around the Internet relatively recently, so none of my samples were processed, normalised or digitally transferred. It's a miracle anything sounded any good under these circumstances. I've since used AkaiDisk to transfer a few of these old samples into the PC and discovered that they peak well under 0dB and are full of noise and hum and stuff. I should be ashamed of myself.

Now I use the S3000XL. It's got all the stuff the S950 didn't have and a load more stuff like Multi program settings and MIDI sample transfer. And 32Mb of memory. That's enough for a very very long burp indeed.

The best thing about samplers is that you can take any sound, put in your computer, clean it up, chop it up, tune it, loop it, cut and paste it and put it through a million plugins. After you've done all that you can transfer it digitally (via SPDIF or MIDI or, one day, SCSI) to the sampler and then play it with a sequencer. It sounds obvious, but I missed out on the computer bit for years and am still amazed by it.

I miss the S950's 12 bit sampling and its filter – it has a biting edge to it that makes the S3000 filters sound boring. If I had more room I'd use both, now that I've got AkaiDisk to transfer samples. I've got three or four floppies that work in the S950's disk drive. Hopefully they'll hold out forever.

Computers / Samplers / Synths / Outboard / Desk