Akai S3000xl

1996, 32 note polyphonic, 44.1khz / 16bit stereo digital sampler.

It was once my dream to own one of these machines. I previously had a Roland W30 which was my main sampler for some time and a fantastic bit of kit but I always wanted the S3000 as it was full bandwidth, stereo, and it had the commonly used and great sounding Akai time-stretch.

It is a shame but I very rarely use this unit any more. I have all my samples from all my old music on floppy disks plus I did make some multi-sampled patches when I first got this sampler so it does still get used occasionally. However, the obvious advantages of software samplers and the on-screen mouse and keyboard interface have taken over. Mainly due to speed of use, it can take hours of button pushing to make a multi patch in the S3000 where I can make one in a matter of minutes in a soft sampler. Plus the routing means with software you can have almost unlimited outputs setup without using half my mixing desk to do it.

A piece of musical history and probably the most popular sampler of all time but not something that has much value to me in the studio anymore. I will say that for live work a hardware sampler will still have its uses but I haven't done any live work for a long time now.