I use Akai S-3200, E-MU E4XT Ultra, Roland S-760, Kurzweil K-2000VP, and Yamaha A3000 and A5000's.

I checked Yamaha [TX16W] even though there's no Axxxx's. I think Yamaha's A-series samplers should be included, or just leave it at "Yamaha". Incredibly creative and weird samplers that can double [and do, lol] as studio FX, too. Surprisingly cool FX.

Cheers!

 

I really want to, no matter how good the sat or the tape effects vst. everyone one of those units has something just a little different about them.. Colors, Swings,..static.. its all good. I want couple of each..
Im gonna be the worst kind of studio hoarder if i get this job lol
and every hip hop head in USA had or still wants a akai. im on the wants still side lol

 

@eXACT_Beats_ AudioZalso has the Pro version to...try before buying

 

Although a source of inspiration is subjective, I think that it is the other way around. We have used them, still use them, and that is the reason why we say that about using hardware samplers.

I agree that software samples are convenient, however, when it comes to sampling, the convenience factor is secondary to the quality and nuances nuances each sampler offers. Those, in the very rare of cases can be truly emulated 100%. Moreover, after using a sampler for years it becomes second nature. I have had my Rolands and Emulator II for over 30 years, what I can do with them is only limited by the hardware itself. What I get in return for patienly waiting for samples to finish loading and turtle-like OS, certainly is priceless!

 

@Pirate Do you have Roland S-550 or S-750? Those are both beasts. Oh well, S-760 is incredible also. :P I am impressed that this little 1HE rack sampler has TRS inputs for sampling. Great sampler, although really complicated to use, but I feel at home with complicated UIs, since I made my first album just with Korg Wavestation SR, Akai S-950, and Oberheim Matrix-6 in '96.

 

@SineWave , I didn't own an s-550 but was really interested in getting one back in the day as it had a lot of interesting features. from supporting an external monitor, a tablet (?!) for drawing waveforms etc... I really wanted one back in 89-90, the sample memory was a little low (at least on the keyboard version), even for the time, and don't remember if it was expandable... but quite a little machine that really was ahead of it's time in some regards for the time of it's release absolutely... (along with the w-30 etc)... but it seemed with the advent of more 'realistic' sounds being available for synthesis at the time with the M1's, D50's etc... probably overlooked as 'sample mania' wasn't quite in full swing 'yet'.... sure, there were plenty of great bands doing interesting things with samples at the time from Public Enemy to nine inch nails and whatnot, but outside of the bomb squad and de la soul etc, most sampling in hip hop (iirc and could be way wrong as I'm prone to being stupid ), most of hip hop was single shot either simple outright loops (the mc hammer/vanilla ice type of thing), or just sampling simpler beats... it's funny how ram cost and whatnot did kinda change the genre in some respects.. but OT....

long story short, yeah, I remember those units, wanted them, and surprised they weren't a bit more successful...

 

I guess it was good in that it made you use your ears more, and whatnot... and I still have transported those samples over etc.. but in a 'get off my lawn' moment, most people have no idea how easy it is now to do what took us days in the past...

 

@sisyphus If i may say so mate. Don't bother with an S-550, unless it's the digital grit (ie. Prodigy style) or lo-fi sound you are looking for. If anything else, find an S-760 fully expanded if possible. I 've had both and the S-760 is superior sounding in everything imho. The filter on the 760 is the same as the S-770 which in its turn is identical to the JD-800/JD-990 series, a few sounds loaded and you 'll think you 're playing a synth instead of a sampler. The 760's only downside when compared to the 770 is it lacks XLR outs. But it can take up to 32mb ram, which is double what the 770 can have. And it has a freaking VGA monitor out lol , so even if the onboard LCD goes bad you can make it work. And it's the only rack mount sampler of that era that is only 1U.
Hope this clarifies a few thingies.
Cheers

 

2 MPC2K XLs and i'm about to add the MPC X in a few weeks.

I love sampling and i love Akai.

 

Oh that absolutely clarifies those products absolutely taskforce, and respect... but yeah, I'm certainly not in the market for any hardware samplers right now, with a few in storage and a few loaned out to friends etc... I was saying back in 1989 or 90 or whatnot I was interested in those for their feature sets... not now! ;) (I just don't have the time or space and am temporarily relocated many thousands of miles away...)..

I haven't bought a hardware sampler since the k2x series, and used/had Akai s1100's and 3200's (can't remember) in active service up until the mid 90's, but I got a sample cell card when it first came out, and was beta testing Opcodes Studiovision with (remember these?) the dat I/O, and turbosynth, sound designer. Once I was able to go in the box back then, and keep samples in same format as what I was recording in Studiovision, I never really kinda looked back, outside of some standouts like the k2x series or for live use. the first sample cell didn't have filters, which did suck, but the expediency of work on it, throwing guitar tracks to it, vocals, what have you.. i don't know, it just worked for my workflow back then..

but the s-760 definitely sounds like a great sampler for it's time, and nice with the ram/size/filters etc...sounds amazingly competent and ahead of it's time, and yeah, I would have loved that.

best to you!

 

Man, you remind me of good times indeed. I love this retro talk, i remember those times fondly. I was sad when Opcode closed biz, they were pioneers.
Of course i remember the Kurzweil K2000 and its iterations. I never had one but my keyboard player for 2 years (in the band i was) had one and he gigged with it. We all admired it for its competence as an all around sampler/synth/ws but in the studio i found its analog outs being more hissy/noisy than it should. Turned out at least some revisions had this small but noticeable flaw. The K2500 that came much later had this fixed. Samplecell ? I dunno how many sleepless nights that gave me lol. A year later i decided i hated it and sold it along with its card and disks. But that was me back then, SC was solid (for a Digi product heheh).
Cheers

 

This was an interesting read... I can't decide what to do....

I've owned an EMU E6400 from new and thinking of selling it.... it's been boxed up for years now.... i do all my sampling via software.

I keep thinking i should sell it -- it just never gets used...... but that hoarder instinct in me keeps stopping me.... arrrrgh dont know what to do.

 

@taskforce : I love this retro talk as well my friend, and I will never forgive Gibson for buying Opcode just to shut it down. Was a really sad day.

There are still things and features on SVPro that I miss to this day, as it was the first sequencer to implement digital audio, but some of the work flow things I haven't been able to do easily on other daws, and I've tried most. Ableton comes the closest..

The K2000 DID have noisy outputs, but that was mostly because they integrated a Digitech fx unit in it after the D to A... iirc, you could turn it off, and I usually didn't use it at all, as it would be applied across all outputs or all parts coming out the stereo out and using multiple midi channels etc.. you know why.. .. but regardless, even without that, i do remember it being a little noisier... I guess I was making noisier stuff and using the wave shaper alg's in it so it didn't really matter much to me..

The sampler portion wasn't as easy (lol) as the Akai's , but it would read Akai programs and data etc... which was nice... and then you could take your samples and keymaps and whatnot and apply the v.a.s.t. engine to them. When scsi gave way to usb, and i still use this workaround with old samplers if I am using them, I would do the transfer of files from my computer to usb zip drive, take the disk out, and put it in a zip drive attached to the K2000 via scsi. quicker then midi transfer obviously..

and I am no fan of digidesign as they have screwed me more times then not, and I have sworn to never purchase another one of their products, but back then, you could literally call the company and get the president or head developer on the phone... it was nuts.. I was on a first name basis with those guys.... now... won't go near it and just export stems or tracks from another daw to whoever should i have to, but my brain doesn't work the way PT does, and i don't compose like that, and I can see why engineers can like it, but we both know the myriad of problems, costs, limitations, and the death grip they get you in... but I did like samplecell...and the second iteration of it more with the TDM bridge to me (wow!) pt3 system haha. what problems did you have with it? It was great in studio obviously, but not live... and it lacked many features of other samplers,... but just the ability to keep everything on one drive or seamlessly move audio to a sampler and back etc for the time was great and mind-blowingly freeing for me... I can understand why others would not...

ah, the days right? kids got it so easy today... get off our lawn, as we used to spend an afternoon breaking up a loop and timing it, editing loop points or truncation on hexadecimal screens, and hell, actually MAKING our own sounds rather then downloading the latest trAp$tar bullshit from sister site... facepalm....

 

Absolutely. I remember like now splitting 1 or 2 bar loops to 16 segments and time-stretching individual parts, then program/midi trigger them as actual subsequent 16th note one shots on my trusted sequencer. That is after i carefully edited starting/end points in every segment making sure they don't click and i don't lose attacks on percussive material, then resaving each segment as individual samples. I had calculated that a 8 mb user bank of those sampled loops would take me 24-30 hrs to do easily. But that was my thing, people came to my project studio knowing their remixes will be catered for. And then Recycle came out and it did half the job. A little later Sonic Foundry's Acid came in '98 and i sold almost all my samplers. I had like 7-8 of them lol. My main thing was making loops by sampling obscure records (which i still have and keep buying more), so Acid as a loop sampler was the best thing to incorporate in my workflow. I just kept my MPC for sentimental reasons. I do have a Yamaha A-4000 too but that was a sort of payment from a client who was unable to pay the normal way. You ever had one of those? hehehe...
I do agree about Digi's policy back then. Even tthough i know nothing about the original management as i am half a planet away, the reps of Digidesign here, were as open as anyone can be. They even brought their (brand new in '94 if i recall?) TDM system to my studio. I remember liking the sound, hating the interface, it was still as PT1 which was essentially OSC's Deck which i already owned lol. What younger peeps don't understand about PT is, the major selling point of the soft was it functionally resembled a typical multi-track tape recorder, so older engineers and producers, also tape operators etc., wouldn't be put off by a steep learning curve. Things is, fast forward almost 30 yrs later after PT in '91 and even with all the smart tools etc, it still resembles a tape recorder. One word, tedious, at least to me.
Ps: I had no probs with SampleCell alone, i had many probs putting it all together in sync with my hardware sequencer.

 

s you noted

I still have a pair S-550 that have kept for sentimental reasons. They were moded by some of us at Roland's R&D during my time there. i also have the S 770. The 7- Series really were, and still are, excellent samplers capable of standing next to any of today samplers. As you noted, the 7 series problem was its complex architecture which took a while to get used to. But it was designed like that for a purpose. Roland new what producers and musicians wanted and sent us on a mission to implement all those features.

 

I don't know, the days of taking forever waiting for things on hardware are pretty much over for the most part. Let the computer do the tough shit for you like cutting up or trimming loops, then just send it over with a SCSI2SD (or over MIDI if you have to) or sample it in from there. You get the best of both worlds. I mean, Im not gonna do sample rate conversion on my E-Mu (you wanna see slow?) but if you prep the samples beforehand a little, you can get right to it in the sampler and still have THAT sound without most of the headaches we used to go through hehe. Chopping on them isn't so bad if you're used to it, I just wish they had cool 'snap to 0' features like my MPC or something like Audiofinder does. That cuts a hell of a lot of work out of things. A lot of it also depends on WHAT gear you're talking though. I only have the Ultra nowadays, so I have an IDE drive inside and several Macs that I can use with it along with Sounddiver, so that makes that part easy as hell for me. The trade off is worth it to me, there's still nothing that really sounds like the Peak/Shelf filter, or what happens when you hit the E-Mus inputs hard. Same with an Ensoniq. You CANT get that sound out of Kontakt/TAL/Halion/Ableton or an Akai even. If only they would've put the REAL Z-Filters from the Morpheus in em. I still take those days off to sit and do nothing but make new patches instead of constantly forcing myself to try and write or mix. That way Ive got an arsenal waiting to go next time I wanna get to it.

 

The Mellotron is a rompler. You were able to buy and swap sounds by changing the tape frame, but you were not able to record your own sounds. N' that is the definition of a sampler. Yeah, sure, you can get your own tapes in there, but it would be like soldering your own eeprom in a proteus.
So I'd say no, Mellotron is not a sampler.

 

Neither a sampler nor a ROMpler. It is a tape replay keyboard. A ROMpler is term given to sound modules that feature stock presets based on samples stored in ROM. The Mellotron stored its sounds on magnetic tape.

 

The S-550 plus SYS-553 was my production box from 1990 to 1994! And a great one.
This is what got me infected with pattern-based composition, later leading to extensive use of Orion Platinum, then Ableton Live and now Korg Gadget on the iPad.
I still own an S-760 that, when using a monitor, is still one of the fastest boxes for live sampling, next to the Korg Microsampler which is fast as hell too (hitting a key to sample immediately to that key. Can't be faster).

 

i really enjoy the whitman's sampler