By
Sense-A
Thu Nov 14, 2024 12:36 pm
I bought a bunch of samplers in the early 2010s before the internet tax (Thanks Trump and your fake conservative Supreme Court picks).
I have asr 10, ensoniq eps-16, original EPS, e-mu e4 , korg dss-1, s1000, s1100, s3000xl, kurzweil 2000s, kurzweil 2500s, roland s770, mpc 4000, Roland mc909, Roland MV8000 maxed
But i really just use the MPC 1000 the most. It's compact, i can travel with it, JJOS2xl is intuitive and i can find every feature i need, i can manage with just 6 output tracks, parts are cheap and available, I can make it sound like old s950 or sp1200 with outboard gear (secret weapons). The mpc1000 can do basic level of filtering but i filter the sound either before going into the mpc 1000 or coming out of it using my six outputs wisely. Also i have a filter on the FX channel for all the line outs that i can individually adjust.
I was not smart enough to hoard the sp1200's and s950's back when they were cheaper. That said, the value of my gear has probably doubled or tripled since i bought it. But I will have to eventually sell because all that stuff takes up a tall rack floor to ceiling and the keyboards take up another tall rack. It would be too expensive to just collect samplers with a short attention span today. The korg dss-1 probably takes up the most space.
One thing that i will say about samplers such as the asr-10 or the akai s1100 is that when you play a sample far away from the root key, it still sounds great on those samplers. I read over at gearspace that this might be called interpolation. These old samplers had some sophisticated algorithms, credit to the guys who encoded them, that gave it a great sound. But if i play samples pitched up or down or too far away from the root key on the akai mpc 1000, it just doesn't sound nearly as good as on the asr-10 or Akai s1100. So in this case i still use the mpc 1000 but might fire up one of those old rack samplers to help out with the sampling then i resample many different pitched keys of that sample into the MPC1000 to give me a better range.
One thing i always found enticing about the sp1200 is the slide potentiometer for each sample that let's you adjust pitch and other sample settings on the fly giving quick intuitive sample adjustments.
