S Series & MPC - Original Intention

When things like the 3K, the s950 , and the s1000 first came out, what was the original intention? Lets say you wanted to sample a snare drum. Was one expected to just plug a mic into them? Or run mics through a pre, and then out into the units? I'm just sorta curious what was expected, or how they were actually used at the time

I mostly sample live instruments / noises. But most of that sampling I do is in studios, or in the street -- away from my MPC. I've been thinking about getting a 950 for the 12 bit factor, but since I'd be transferring sounds into iy, that were already recorded into a DAW elsewhere, i'm not sure if its worth it...

They probably intended people to run things through a mic pre/mixer then into the mpc for sampling drums and percs. If its helps, roger linn made the mpc's purely for guitar players at home to sequence drum loops to play along with. Then take the song into the studio and have a real drummer play it. The s series was a little more open ended and I think had more intent to be used for instrument sampling (hence the full ADSR, crossfading etc..)

If you want to see what they had in mind, check out the roger linn training video for the mpc60. And if you want some more in depth info on the creation and intentions of the mpc60 check out the video of roger speaking at the decibel festival. He's goes into a little history

Drum/sample libraries also played a significant role back in the early days for those who wanted to quickly create a drum/instrument track without the tedious task of having to sample the audio themselves or didnt have access to instruments. Hence the Akai S1000 became the industry standard sample format to which most hard/soft samplers to this day are compatible. The MPC60/3000 and Akai S900/950 also had large Akai and third-party sound libraries; the S900 was the industry standard sampler before the S1000 came along with 16bit and stereo.

Ah very interesting. I was always curious about that. I know people used the, i was just curious how people used them exactly.

clint246clint wrote:Drum/sample libraries also played a significant role back in the early days for those who wanted to quickly create a drum/instrument track without the tedious task of having to sample the audio themselves or didnt have access to instruments. Hence the Akai S1000 became the industry standard sample format to which most hard/soft samplers to this day are compatible. The MPC60/3000 and Akai S900/950 also had large Akai and third-party sound libraries; the S900 was the industry standard sampler before the S1000 came along with 16bit and stereo.

good question. The layout of the S series looks to me they just wanted to cover all bases. There are separate mic and line inputs, it works well in either situation. The S900 and S950 had drum trigger settings, so I take it the ideal situation was for drummers to load up sounds from their studio recordings to use live? It's equally aimed at making keyboard sounds like mellotron or emulator. I'm almost certain they designed the "alternating loop" and "crossfade loop" features to help make a melodic instrument with a more natural sounding sustain, but they also made it so you can make alternating/crossfade loops out of much longer samples, whole phrases. This has really interesting results, but what kind of musician did they design this for!

They were meant to be used independently too. The luxury of the second hand market spawned artists that combined them for music making concepts because they're not $4k anymore. Each model catered to different users so people aquainted to synth enviroments would take the 950, musicians that play guitar can take the 3k for a drummer.

They're all meant to record so a **** preamp would be a good idea.

I dont know... but the loop is great for keys patches like organs or rhodes with chorus etc.. so yeah like you said, you can hold down a key and it will play for a long time.

the guy I got my s900 from years ago bought his brand new and made an album with it (it got released) and I believe he did some soundtrack stuff for some films.. and perhaps he did ambient sound for stage art installations and poetry or some sh!t like that. He said didn't use a sequencer at all.. he triggered all the loops live with a keyboard apparently.

I dont know what type of audio this is... but apparently he made this with the s900 he sold me



Im guessing the sample triggering part is what he made.. I dont know though which exact part is coming from the s900, and if there were other things in there or what...

Samplers in general and the s-series is no exeption, were made with the intention to give keyboard players more natural sounding instruments at hand and also give more experimental musicians the ability to manipulate them. It was a natural evolution of musical instruments. Analog synths went digital with stuff like the DX7, analog sampler went digital too from mellotron to Synclavier and Failight CMI to Emu Emulator and Akai S series.
They all had a loop function to extend the sustain time. In those days memorychips costs 100s - 1000s $ and since the most important phase to recognize an acoustic instrument is the attack they developed the loop function to save memory.
These samplers were used in so many songs of the 80s you can't count them. As time went by memory got cheaper and so the later samplers had 8MB then 32MB, 64MB and in case of the later E-mu 128 MB. There were library preset with 16MB of piano samples and velocity layers etc.

Beside the emulation of acoustic instruments, there was always the experimental urge to sample all the other stuff that makes noise. Voices, animals, signal horn, breaking windows, smashing hammer on whatever and play it on a keyboard. Peter Gabriel is known for this, Mike Oldfield also sampled vox and FX sounds.

peace