During the class session me and my partner both had the opportunity to use a piece of equipment called the “Akai S2000” which is an analogue sampler. To start using this piece of equipment you must turn it on by pressing the power button, then you would be prompted to enter a system disk which is just a floppy disk. After letting the Akai load, we then ejected the floppy disk and set the sampler to sample from then we used the wheel to manually go through the letters on the digital screen to name the recording that we want to sample. To record into the sampler, we first armed it then by holding the “f2” button and letting our sample play.
Afterwards we had to use the group buttons to flip to what we recorded which then allowed us to play the sample using a midi controller at any pitch. After we got used to the workflow of the Akai S2000 we managed to record a few samples that we later exported and further manipulated into Logic to start building a beat. We sampled some Piano and some vocals from Kung Fu movies to reflect Rza’s production.
Back in the day this would have been a perfect tool for any producer who wanted to sample anything and achieve that extra level of creativeness within their work. Having the opportunity to use the Akai S2000 helped me realise how blessed we are in today’s age with having wide access to multiple DAWs where the workflow of sampling is much quicker and easier than using the Akai S2000 since the work flow with the Akai is very manual and there is a very short window to what you can actually capture and sample and I can only imagine how tedious it must get to first find the perfect sample then actually start producing manually using the Akai. Overall, I do believe there is still a use of this sampler in today’s era since the analogue sound it provides, I believe is hard to replicate in a DAW and has an extra warmness to the sound.