I was the US product manaer for the Akai line from early 1987 to 1994. It was a fun time with a lot of great products. I also programmed 65 disks for the early S900 sample library.
That’s awesome. As an old hip-hop head you had a hand in my formative influences! The sound of these machines shaped so many classics that I still bump today. I only recently learned that up under the MPC 60, 60 II, and even the e-mu SP series was often the venerable S950! I thought I knew what they were doing back then but I only had half the story.
DJ Premier has been doing a great series on his channel about how he made all his hits. Crazy that he used an S950 and MPC 60 basically his entire career.
@def creator he's trying to keep things simple for an audience that aren't musicians. I would love it if he went into more technical detail, but I bet his team thinks it would alienate too many people and he wouldn't get enough views. I think the stories are entertaining most of the time anyway though
@def creator I imagine he doesn't want to draw attention to a lot of the illegal/questionable samples he snuck through back in the day. And, as mentioned, trying to keep it simple for all of his fans. He still let's some gems of knowledge out from time to time, and is a great storyteller.
It cleaned up nice... you should have seen all the brown tape residue and scuff marks when I picked it up for you earlier. But elbow grease and some compounds made it shine a little once more. :D Bring on the gritty samples, my friend!
My Amiga 1000 computer's sampling which came out the year before was a great solution for a teenager like me or amature musician, and plenty good enough for my use of live performance. It had a full Windows style mouse driven OS. Sample length and quality was limiter only by the amount of ram & drive space you had, which could go up to 8 megs and hard drives could be added. I could even load Mirage disks. No better combined value of a state of the art personal computer, state of the art game console, and a versatile musical instrument for the mid 80s that had no equal in the computer market. It was 8 bit sampling, but up to 14 bit sample quality using some tricks. Also wasn't limited to sampling with it's DSP sound chip but emulated various forms of synthesis like subtractive, FM, additive & drum machine emulation.
Thanks for this Espen. As a teenager, I really wanted one because of Fatboy Slim, Prodigy, DJ Shadow ... and I could actually afford it, as few cared about them in the early 2000s. I had so much fun with the Akai samplers. They don't have much intrinsic character (compared to some Yamaha or EMU) but somehow, they make you focus entirely on the sound. And you can use them as synths too! Just load basic waveforms and use the LFOs / ENVs / Filters, well on the later series ... So many albums (trip hop, ambient, jungle ...) were made on these. They have a special place in my heart, love them, really!
Still to this day the s900 sound is being used extensively in modern pop music, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay, Weeknd all using the first beat Espen shows before the add.
Aah the golden trio which will cover all your sounds. İ still use in studio s1000 for drums+ e5000 ultra for basses+ a3000 V2 for pads and vocals. You cannot beat their sound.
The real charm with these units is in overdriving the inputs just the right amount when sampling (don't overdo it or things will sound like farts), tweaking each sound a bit with that unique filter, and then feeding the individual outputs into a mixer for further eq/processing. That's how I use my X7000, which I believe has the same engine as the s900, except it has about half the sample time. I mostly use mine for drums
I owned one of those machines. May the Gods bless you! And please DO NOT downplay what it could do. You could buy Fairlight sample disks with all kinds of sounds. The limit was only your imagination! That's what made some 80's music so powerful and transcendental in time. People are STILL trying to figure out how they created such great music with that technology compared to what we have today!?!?! CREATIVITY
Totally agree with that!! 👍 Though I did like the 70's music. There was a lot of styles of music.... Plus I got more into my old school band after leaving school in 76. After all there was plenty of styles to choose from. I just wish I still kept my keyboards! 😭😭
The Akai S900 from 1986. A 12-bit sampler, 63 sec sampling time and a very (for the time) easy and fast operating system. The S900 made Akai the kings of sampling and soon total domination. 00:00 Intro and demo music 01:00 History of Akai samplers in the 80s 05:38 Sampling (REC) 07:24 Edit Sample 09:26 Edit program 11:58 Disk format and saving 13:38 Outputs 16:30 Voice out 17:03 Misc. Support this channel on Patreon: www.patreon.com/espenkraft The easy and fast (compared to other models form other companies) operating system, a very favorable price around £1699 and lots of other features made this the object of desire for a lot of people. The S900 (and 950) has a massive cult status today and people are still using these for their sound, especially for their grungy time-stretching abilities, resampling and manipulations. In the mid 80s, this was also used for glossy pop as the S900 had 8 individual outputs so it was a perfect drum sampler. With a growing popularity it soon dominated the world of sampling and Akai would continue their climb to the throne. Any other brand getting in on the sampling market lived in the shadow of Akai as Akai was the sampling standard anyone else had to obey. Those who didn't would soon quit the sampling business all together. The demo track is made using only samples from the S900 of course. Many of the sounds are sampled from my own synths and drum machines. Find my music here: iTunes Apple music: apple.co/35ZTdfR Spotify: spoti.fi/38aoWMB Bandcamp: espenkraft.bandcamp.com/ Google Play: bit.ly/2NrgXD9 Find my patches and sample packs through these links: thepatchbay.co.uk/product/tal-sampler-the-digital-collection-vol-1-by-espen-kraft/ sound7.co.uk/products/italo-disco-synth-pop
The first proper professional studio I recorded in back in the late 80s / early 90s, had an AKAI S900 or 950 I forget which. The studio owner had previously toured as a session musician for some big names in the 1970s and early 80s. A special feature on him was in Sound On Sound Magazine in 2000 I think. His name is Carl Stipetic. His studio in the early 90s was quite minimal by modern standards, but he sure knew how to dial in the very best sounds and production methods from it all. I remember a violin sample he had on the AKAI, which was like nothing I have heard since. Very raw and full of character, and with a nice Lexicon reverb just sprang out of the mix in a addictive way.
Love your videos. I was in high school and had an Akai X7000 back in '87 but always wanted a S900 instead. I remember seeing Peter Gabriel live around then and he had several S900s in use.
When using multisamples with root note C, I prefer making root note in the middle of keygroup. Breaking keygroups with G and F# rather than C and B. That way gives every sample 6 semitones pitch down and 5 semitones pitch up. 12bit samplers have charm in pitching samples down. Doing it as you did all samples other than lowest one have no pitch down and have only pitch up for almost an octave which can sound froggy on short bass sounds. Cheers! S
You're absolutely right. I too do this often. I felt it was easier and faster to make the part of the video with the C, but I agree completely for "real life" sampling and key-grouping. Thanks for commenting! :)
Yep, to take this further, I usually sample the middle note of whatever key I'm using for that part in a song, not just always C. This way I can get away with just one sample for bass, one sample for chords (assuming the chords only use one octave). You only really need multiple key groups for instruments that need to span multiple octaves. The stretching of samples can act like built-in key-scaling if done right.
The first thing that came to mind when I saw this was how convenient it was that it should show up in my recommendations right after I had asked you about a sampling unit that had an interface that was user friendly. The other thing that came up while I was watching the video itself had to do with that gray chassis and how unusual it was. Something I’d like to know is if the designers at Akai were inspired by the Octave-Plateau Voyetra synthesizers which were also built in chassis of that shade. I also wouldn’t mind knowing if Roger Linn had a hand in the design of this module. I’m aware that he was hired onto the Akai design staff after Linn Electronics went out of business. Not only make this model have features from the Linn 9000 under its hood, but Roger is the one who pioneered designing drum machines with multiple outputs
People who are very famous today, like hip-hop groups like Run-DMC, DeLaSoul, Chacka khan, Cold Cut, Todd Terry, Fatboy Slim... They started with the Casio Rz1 which was very cheap but with individual audio outputs. It was the best alternative for high school or university students, S900 was very expensive for many in 1986, but there were cheap things like Casio Sk1, Yamaha VSS, some mixers with 8-second samplers that allowed you to play instrumentals. Mac Classic II with Basillik also had software for sampling with farallon hyper sound, those were primitive years, and the most profitable thing was a Mac Cassic with some audio programs. The rest came later and 12-bit and 16-bit samplers offered better sound quality than a computer in 1986. Thanks for all this content, you have a great channel, thank you.
Hey Espen - Great piece of nostalgia 👍 Like most musicians at the time, I wanted hi fi quality and couldn't quite pull the trigger on one of these but I did buy a S1000 for a project which didn't come off and it was sadly under-used and eventually sold. It was in my 1990's studio but I'd forgotten all about it until I saw this😁
Nice review my friend! The S900 is a beast! I still have my S900 but the disk drive stopped working years ago. I made so many beats on that thing using a cheap Yamaha PSR keyboard to trigger it and an Alesis MMT-8 to sequence my tracks. I need to get it out of storage and retrofit a disk emulator like you’ve got there and fire up the beast!
How do you get that though? I ain’t very good at electronics can you buy them online and are they easy to install? I heard someone else say they sample digitally into it, but not sure what’s the difference? I wonder is that a bit like the ESQ-1 where it’s digital wave forms which go thru an analog filter.
These machines ( including the S612 and S20) are still the stuff of dreams. So much I pretend my Volca Sample is an S series :-) great video as always Mr. Kraft!
good call out on the module color, never really paid any attention to that. its definitely the first thing my eyes are drawn too when seeing a rack of gear. great comprehensive vid! these are coveted in jungle circles
I am really inspired from this, i could really see this right beside my commodore amiga 2000 and hooked up to midi, so i can extend my samples wich can be played simutainously. or to sample whole sequences, to sequence even more sequences
I really love this sampler. Unfortunately, its in my garage with a broken disk drive. I need to get a floppy emulator. Nice shout to Pet Shop Boys and Fatboy Slim.
As always, that was great! Very enjoyable. I now know what I’m going to do with any spare time I have this weekend. I’ve got an Akai S01 that hasn’t seen any action for ages so it’s going to get connected and played with. Cheers.
I remember buying an Akai X7000 from Musical Exchanges in Birmingham, England in the 90s. I had to carry it to the train station, which was over a mile or so away. It was so heavy that if anybody wanted to steal it off me, they would have been welcome to it. That's if they could carry it themselves!!
Had mine for over a decade, S900 & ASK90 trigger input expansion. A great bit of kit. Once you have learnt it, you can blast through sampling and program setups.Much better sound to the S1000 thanks to the analogue filter.
Great video Espen! Huge fan of the S/X samplers from Akai. S612 was the first I got my hands on. Resently got a X7000 wreck. Hope to get it back to former glory. Recall Nitzer Ebb opening for DM back in ’88. A lot of off white samplers on stage. I was blown away. Great times 😃
Reason DAW was the first to emulate physical gear and they have a sampler from the beginning back 20 years ago to today they has a device very similar to Akai samplers.
I owned Akai, Roland, Ensoniq, and Kurzweil samplers. They were all great, but none had a character that I truly loved as the Emu samplers did. Like you said though, Akai ruled! Thankfully my Kurzweil 2000, 2500, and 2600 read Akai samples quite well back in the day.
Thinking to get a k2000 or s900 - both sround 300 usd. Not sure which to get, both a bit huge and im running out of space but i got GAS and do need another multitimbral sampler 😅 I got a roland S760 but the disk is dead and i dont know how to replace with zuluscsi. Which do you recommend?
That’s a great tip with putting the high hats on the same output. I love this about music production, there is always a work around thru the limitations. (and ‘limitations’ are welcomed for creativity in an age of endless options). This is what is great about the old ways compared to the new. Cheers🎉
I bought 2 x S3000XL for less than 100 GBP a couple of years ago. Definitely not in the same ball park as this beast but not a bad sampler at all. Keep up the good work!!!
Launching a thousand bands! On a personal note, for some reason I forget how physically large these were. I do remember hauling a few of these around in a rack. Hard drives were still years away for me too, due to costs and fragility.
oh yes...the good old days. My very first sampler was an Akai S01, the mono box. I was proud to be able to double the internal memory from 16 to 32MB. I used it to sample my own Yamaha bass across all 8 banks. Surprisingly, it actually worked quite well. And today the good old box is in the attic with old Ataris and is gathering dust....actually a scandal.
That IS a scandal. What is it doing there? Get it down and use it, or sell it to someone that will actually make some music with it. Gear are meant to be used, not stored away. ;-)
@@EspenKraft Oh believe me I've sold quite a few of my old 80's/90's hardware stuff. In 2018 I sold hardware for several thousand euros. Starting with my old, fully upgraded, beloved Atari Falcon 030 with Cubase Audio 2.0, Steinberg Midex Plus, Atari Mega ST 2, Roland TR 909, two EMU Ultra 5000 Samplers, Yamaha MU 50/80Synths, Roland jv 1080, U220/U110, various Roland Sound Canvas, Casio VZ-10m, Roland VS2400 CD, Yamaha Motif 6. I may have forgotten something, too. Today I still have the Akai S01, a Kawai R50 drum machine with the E sound chip expansion. Funnily enough, I dusted it off again 2 months ago and switched it on. But she didn't want to anymore. Display only dimly lit, some sounds are no longer played at all or only choppy. I think it's the internal battery that needs to be replaced. I have no idea what else is flying around up there. Except for Ataris yet. And now...since 2020 I've bought hardware FX and a tape machine again and I'm doing a lot of things this way again and using fewer plug-ins....crazy.
I had an S01 too! I got it new then got a S900 for like $450 if I remember. I gave my S01 away to an up and coming producer I knew, keep the S900 and then got an MPC3000 which I still use!
I’ve only ever looked at pics of the front....your intro ( & you leaning on it ) demos how its a REALLY big unit isn’t it!😳. Makes sense considering PC technology when it made...interesting to this is obviously one of the Akai with the output to use with theirs synths 🤔. Thanks for the run through Espen,
Whoever figured out how to maximize sampling time on the S950 by feeding it sped up samples then pitching down will always have a special place in my heart.
I bought a S900 when it came out, it was in our studio for almost 30 years but unfortunately we lost it when the studio burned down. Should get another one soon.
Don't forget A Guy Called Gerald. Voodoo Ray called because he ran out of memory. It was originally Voodoo Rage from a vinyl recording of Derek and Clive 😀
At my college I attended (way back when) they had one of these (S900) in the music studio there, along with a bunch of other cool gear such as the D-50, S-50 and HR-16.
Thank you for the great demo of the S900! I particularly liked the intro with the rotating S900, close up view with bokeh, and slow downed music. How did you make the rotation smoothly stop facing the camera? Aside from the powerful standard sampling features, I like the Akai because it is particularly good at super slow playback like you did in the intro. I don't know why, but other samplers would produce harsh sounds at slow speeds while Akai would still be usable. This was an attribute of the DR-4d/8/16 multitrack recorders too, with their jog/shuttle scrubbing capability.
I took out a bank loan in around 1990 I think and bought an Atari, Cubase 2.0, a Yamaha SY22 ( that was a mistake!) and.. an S950. I felt like the king of the world for weeks! I got so quick with the 950 I could virtually use it with my eyes closed! I honestly think I was way more creative on that basic setup than on all the DAWS that I’ve owned since lol
I know exactly how you feel. We were much more creative and productive because we didn't have a gazillion options at out hands. We had a few pieces of gear we knew very well and the brain didn't have to focus on options options and more options. Cheers
@@EspenKraft I added an ESQ-1 later. A synth I believe we both love? Wish I never sold it… I was looking for an ESQ-M for the longest time, but I’m happy enough with the Arturia one for now. That taught me what a real synth could do and how limited the SY-22 was :)
I don't love the ESQ that much. ;-) I've sold the ones I had too and I can't say I miss them very much. They've been well emulated now and I can live with those instead.
I have worked for years with an S900. It's a great machine. It broke down one day, I could have kept the money to buy a more efficient one, I preferred to have it repaired and continue to work with it. Unfortunately it was stolen from my cellar. But I'll buy another one someday. Best Regarding its weight, and if you have to use it regularly for live, moving around with it, physical training will be necessary. 😜
Great video Espen! I never heard of this modification om the input circuit. Very interesting and I'll probably do this mod on one of my 2 s900. One of my s900 has the ASK90 board installed. It's an 8-channel audio trigger board which can be used with any audio signal to trigger samples. Probably most used with a drumset or E-drums like the simmons drums. The sensitivity can be adjusted for every channel.
I had a Casio FZ1, i did look at the yamaha tx16w but settled on the Casio for it's detailed display which could also draw the waveform out as a graphic you could zoom into
In the early 1990's the Akai S950 Sampler was responsible for entirety new genre of music, UK Jungle/Drum & Bass, without the Akai's famous time-stretch function and the basic low pass filter, early 90's Jungle would have sounded very different.
Yes very true and the Samplers like s900 and the MPC beat machines made Hip Hop possible and if you didn't know, the first DnB tracks were made from putting hip hop break beats at dubble tempo from 90bpm to 180bpm. I use Reason DAW to make DnB and I use the stock sampler called Oct Rex for its hip hop beat selection and time stretching. I load up hip hop drum loops and put to 180 and most of My drum and bass starts off with that. Infact I probably use Rex loops to greater or lesser extent in every DnB tune I make.
You forgot about the E-MU SP-1200 which is the real pioneer of Hip Hop long before the MPC existed. Virtually every Hip Hop producer has used the SP-1200.
Yeah both S900 and S950 have a great crunch, from my understanding they both also used a clock per voice to pitch the samples also, which not a lot of samplers do. S1000/S1100 is probably the newest characterful akai rackmount worth looking at as it was using some interesting windowed interpolation methods for pitching the sounds. After that it is a bit more boring larger ram sizes meant higher quality sampling, meant they could get away with basic linear interpolation which was far less CPU intensive but ultimately lacked a lot of what made the earlier ones so interesting.
Very accurate summary. The S1000/1100 are the latest models to give any sort of "magic" although these two models don't offer the 12-bit "crunch" being 16-bit samplers.
@@EspenKraft Yeah the only modern hardware that I have found to have an old rack akai like sound is the Squid Salmple in eurorack, much more like an S1000 than older though. Some really nice workflow too compared to the old units, but it doesn't do everything they do.
The synergy between your (excellent) RU-vid channel and buying great gear is going to pay you an awesome retirement in the Bahamas or wherever you desire. Great video btw.
Still have my S1000 with a broken display (common problem) in my basement. No reason to get rid of it. Maybe time to get that display going again instead!
Very cool video! I are trying to learn sampling nowdays, but worked earlier in a musicstore in 4 years so sold both E-MU and Yamaha A3000... And a family I know throw away and full spec E-Mu (6400 perhaps) for around 60000 NOK when the software samplers was good enough...
Speaking of Jeff Rona, I actually purchased his S900 from him about 5 years ago. He also had it modded with the Oberheim (Marion Systems) upgrade which allows you to sample at either 12 bit or 16 bit. Of course I have no reason to sample at 16 bit because if I want 16bit I'll just use my S1100 - lol.
Espen The first thing you play at 4:53 is the identical beat used in ED Sheeran's song Overpass Graffiti. It's also used in Coldplay's song Higher Power. Recent 2021 releases and smash hits, Two of the most popular UK artists in the world.
Pure coincidence. Never heard the songs you mention. I was just copying a Howard Jones drum machine opening, so if anything they copied HIM. I don't listen to Ed Sheeran.
I have one of these I bought in the last couple months with the Gotek Drive and all. Sounds amazing... I do however have some issues with it. I get random freeze ups at times. Usually once i record my second sample in it would freeze. Lately I set the sample times to max and I can rewrite over that sample with no freezes. I obviously use this machine mostly for resampling. When I sample something longer it seems I get some artifacts from a Possible Ram issue but when I check my Ram it says its OK. Love this unit since I got it for cheap but since its not full operational I seem to be not about to use it to its full potential. May take it in for a fix in February if I cant find a fix. Once again. Amazing unit. I do want a S950 or a SP1200 though to go with.
This is a very sought after machine(together with the S950) as it has a unique filter, this plus 12bit sampling gets you that punchy early 90s /80s hiphop sound. See ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ROSxeiMW79k.html from Bomb The Base which was produced on a pair of S900s as an example of the S900s grit.
Oh, also from the same year, 1987, MARRS - Pump Up The Volume - all S900 again... ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-w9gOQgfPW4Y.html It's easy to see the historical significance of S900 with these 2 seminal tracks.
This is also the form factor I really need miss and want . Mine ( s 1000 ) finally died many years ago and was replaced with an asr 10 16 bit plus ! Also very cool but the Akai was much more straight forward and focused on sampling. And “way less “ menu diving as well . 👽
Well, Akai had a massive impact more in the late 80s. Yet nobody cares about them now. But the SP1200 on the other hand are worth a lot. I'd argue the Emu Emulators and the Ensoniq Mirage put sampling in the hands of many before then.
I wonder how I could incorporate an S900 or 950 into the modern MPC workflow. The stretching, filters and overall sound of those units warped me for life haha
I treasure my E6400 Ultra not for its converters or any garbage like that I use it cause of what it can do to samples...it's able to mix and mangle things in ways I never could've imagined
I've got an S2k and an S5k. The S5k I've slowly been adding parts over the years and the only card left to get is the ADAT which I'm not really too bothered about.
I used to drool over samplers like the Akai S900, S1000 or the Kurzweil and EMU samplers. But I couldnt afford any of them. Best I could do was get the Roland W-30 Sampling workstation (which I still own). I did for a brief moment get the Yamaha TX16W sampler which I just couldnt figure out.
Very nice! Are those three chords at 14:20 from The Golden Boy? Seems like I know them from your catalog somewhere. Love 'em! Emotionally evocative. I don't own any Akais, which is weird; I seem to have many others from all around the same time.
