Kil wrote:I was thinking about the SP-1200 and the drums which to me are the best in hip hop hands down and I remember an article in wax poetics about Pete Rock giving up the SP for the Mpc2000xl and he said "The SP has a heavier sound for drums than the MPC I found. And the SP, for me, when I'm eqing it's more hip hop. It's stronger. Working with the MP, it's a little bit thinner. But the MP is dope, because it does more to make up for the loss." But with the resampling feature on the MP, can you get your drums to sound like a SP's? I was messing around with the resampling feature on the XL just to see but in all honesty I wasn't REALLY hearing a difference in my drums. Is there a trick to this because I'm assuming the reason the resampling feature was added was to try to "dirty it up a little" (like the manual says) or is the moral, the MP's just don't match up to the SP with drums.
The sp1200 was designed in 1987. At that time 16-bit samplers were selling for $10,000. It was simply more cost effective for EMU to bump down the sample rate and the bit depth to squeeze more sample time into the machine.
If something is twelve-bit it will sound distorted and crunchy if there aren't enough digital bits to represent differences in volume in the audio sample. Halving the sample rate to 22,000 means that the highest frequency you can play back is about 10khz. Most people can hear up to about 16khz-17khz. So the Sp1200 sounds Bassier and smoother because of the lack of the top frequencies and crunchy because of the low bit rate. What other people might call dull and distorted!
If you want that kind of sound you could use something like sound-forge or wavelab and do all your downsampling/bit reduction because it takes forever to resample on the MPC.
But it probably won't sound the same as the SP. Internally the EMU and AKAI stuff would be quite different in the analoge stages of each machine. This is the part of the sampler that turns the digital data into stuff we can hear. This analog stage is really importrant in the overall colour of the sound of the machine.
I think that it's ultimately a question of character. The SP1200 will always have a certain sound because of the design limitations of the era it was built in. Same with MPC 60. The MPC 2000 onwards has less of a character because its sampler is more advanced and performs more accurately. What you get out of the MPC is more or less what you put into it soundwise. It definitely has a character but it's less easy to pin down.
There's a quote that's appropriate. I think it was by Robert Moog: "let machines sing in their own voices"
Let the MPC sound like itself and it'll work perfectly. The MPC is more than capable of delivering the goods. It can do everything and a whole lot more than the SP1200. At the end of the day it doesn't matter what Pete Rock thinks of it. It's what you think of it that counts.
