Ableton Forum

hi,

here is my quandry... once upon a time, my sampler was an essential part of my show... (along with a carload of synths/rack fx etc) and now, since live has come into my life, the poor thing just sits in the studio rarely getting turned on...

is there anyone out there who still uses their samplers? or have you all gotten rid of them years ago?

Down at the local music swap shop, someone else's sampler has been sitting there.... for months... so i know that mine certainly won't be able to be sold quickly...

is the poor thing doomed to be in the discount bin? or can anyone think of anything creative i can use it for?

-am

fraid so. My yamaha A3000 might as well be a paperweight. I used to love it more than anything, but now it's useless.

It's just sooooo much easier to do everything onscreen on a PC.

I've even dug it out for nostalgia's sake thinking it could give a new edge to things, but I unplugged it within half an hour because it drove me mad with it's pissy little LCD + it's dodgy knobs.

Why bother when a fully loaded PC can blow it out the water. Face it man, we all bought lemons. At least our pcs have other uses, those of us who bought samplers in the 90s bought highly depreciable machines and cant get two leaves and some spittal for them now. Gutted. The worst thing is the Yamaha A3000 is a great bit of hardware (save the flawed knobs) but it was of that time when the quality was digital - so no overtly distinctive sound to call it's own, so once the concept became superceded by PCs it became worthless. $3000 australian dollars in 1997 - I was paying the loan for a couple of years, now i'm doing the same but for a laptop and software, but I can do about a million more things with them.

My S3200 can do sounds that nutin else does - specially in the filter and fx sections - so I'm keeping it. Its getting a new LCD soon. But the S6000 - soon to be sayonara baby (due in most part to Our Favourite Software)

Go on, make a grown man cry, anyone sold an S6000 lately? what did ya get for it

p

Pitch Black wrote:My S3200 can do sounds that nutin else does - specially in the filter and fx sections - so I'm keeping it. Its getting a new LCD soon. But the S6000 - soon to be sayonara baby (due in most part to Our Favourite Software)

Go on, make a grown man cry, anyone sold an S6000 lately? what did ya get for it

p

In my day I owned three: An Akai S-01, a Roland SP-808 (piece of CRAP I hated it) and an Electrix Repeater in that order.

The Repeater retained its value quite well, I sold mine for more than I bought it for. Can't say that for the other two. That's because the repeater was the only one that manipulated audio in REAL TIME... Damn, that was a fine machine. But Live rendered them all obsolete.

On a side note, the Akai S-01: It weighed around twenty five pounds, took up two DEEP rack spaces. It had a whopping 16 seconds of monophonic 16 bit 44.1 Khz memory. I remember that it's biggest selling feature was that it had "CD QUALITY AUDIO". wow. You could adjust the root key of the sample, but it couldn't time stretch or pitch shift. It would Loop, One Shot or gate the sample on keypresses. Oh ya, it recognized VELOCITY and could change the volume, provided you used a velocity sending midi keyboard. Mind bending shit in the day.

The sad part is I originally payed well over fifteen hundred bucks for this future relic, and traded it about two years ago for a meal and couple of CDs if I recall exactly. Then I found out later that it was on the verge of becoming a rare "collectors item" and I could have gotten around three or four hundred bucks. DAMN.

My advice: sell your A3000 or S6000 to one of those snobby dickheads who wants to keep electronic music exclusive: you know the type, they fought against the software revolution tooth and nail, and have old gear just so they can show that they were doing it years ago. They'll pay more than it's worth. You know the type I'm talking about, those exclusive snobs with all the vintage gear they barely know how to use...

L8er
Montrealbreaks

yeah, unfortuately my esi2000 aint no collectors item...

I did see a doco a little while back on Japanese no-input music... maybe i'll give that a shot with it

catch ya,
am

i ditched all my samplers,i still miss the color of akai s3000xl,but i can live with it.
when i travel i used to carry for 60kg of gears now it fits in my bag.

I recently sold my S2000 - the interface was just stupid!

I'd like something like an MPC or maybe an EPS or W30 or basically anything else that's a sampler, sequencer and controller in one. Just for sound/loop design and such, something self contained, really hands on and gritty sounding, but it'd be more so I'd get away from the computer from time to time ... But what makes Live such a fantastic writing tool for me is the fact that the lines between sequencer and sampler are blurred; I can do melodies from just one looped flute sample and the clip envelopes, and nothing beats it for chopping up breaks and other samples... it's an integral part of my music now.

-Paws

i too have dissed all my samplers. i have owned an E-mu ESI4000, an
E-mu ESynth Ultra (kinda wish i'd hung on to that one), an Ensoniq ASR X Pro, and an Akai CD3000. right now Live is all the sampler i need. i also have been liking the NNXT in Reason. Reload is just amazing, can't believe how well it works. if i need some extra horsepower i'll occasioanlly use my EXS24 inside Logic. sadly, it doesn't even compare to the NNXT for loading Akai banks.

well.... starting in the 80s.......
i had a fairlight (hundred grand plus,8 note poly, 1.5 secs sampling)
then an emulater then an emax THEN 2 akai 1000's, then 3 akai
3200's so i think i get the" pissing a small fortune away on samplers"
award

i will admit it. i kind of miss my old mpc2000. i wish i still had it. not so much because of its extravagant features(sarcasm) but i simply enjoyed working with it and i got alot done out of it, the lower sound quality of it made my drums punchier (although a redux or bit crusher does the same thing) but i also liked the swing of it. call me what u will, but i honestly would like to get one again in the future. i enjoy working with hardware. im not one of those exclusive snobs with all the vintage gear they barely know how to use. i enjoy computers as well, but i like to combine them with hardware. maybe its just a phase for me. but i do feel sorry for anyone that bought that roland vari-phase2000 for $2500 about 4 years ago. i guess it all depends on the piece of gear, i would like to have a nord lead and a waldorf in my studio some day, but a triton would just be an overpriced paperweight.

technova wrote:well.... starting in the 80s.......
i had a fairlight (hundred grand plus,8 note poly, 1.5 secs sampling)
then an emulater then an emax THEN 2 akai 1000's, then 3 akai
3200's so i think i get the" pissing a small fortune away on samplers"
award

How the fuck did you pay for the Fairlight?!

And you get the 'pissing a fortune-of-somewhat-significant-size away on samplers' award BTW

-Paws

Slightly OT but one sampler which is STILL pretty much unmatched in the software world unless you start getting into Reaktor on the side is the Kurzweil K2000/2500...what a beast!
As far as the mpc2000 goes, there's one sitting right here and it's going nowhere- there's nothing like just loading it up and banging out some beats...and the note repeat button....nearly worth it for that alone. Anyone who knows Atom/Atomheart knows what an MPC devotee he is for live shows, and he's a man who's SERIOUS about his software craziness too. For anyone who doesn't know Atom's stuff, check his own Rather Interesting label (esp. Stereonerds, Roger Tubesound Quartet etc) and the sublime Flanger albums on Ninja Tune's offshoot NTone.