Akai S1000 digital sampler

An oldie but a goodie. Akai’s great sampler of the late 1980s, It actually still stacks up pretty well today. A 16-bit, 22kHz to 44.1kHz sampler with 16MB of RAM. There are plenty of advanced editing capabilities for looping, truncating, sample merging, time comp/exp, tuning and even analog-like parameters to control its filters and envelopes. Individual outputs for each of the 16 voices, stereo mix out, stereo input, MIDI, and trigger inputs round out this machine as a professional vintage-status sampler.

Polyphony : 16 voices
Sampler : 16-bit linear sampling (44.1kHz, variable) 47.4 seconds MAX sample time at 22kHz
VCA : ADSR
Effects : None
Arpeg/Seq : None
Keyboard : None (S-1000KB: 61 notes with velocity + aftertouch)
Storage : 16 MB
Control : MIDI

“The entire Akai sampler range, starting with the S1000 and then S1100 and S3000 was used extensively on DM and Recoil albums. They appear all over ‘Violator’, ‘SOFAD, ‘Unsound Methods’ and others. Flood was a big fan. In particular, many of the famous ‘Violator’ and ‘SOFAD’ drums were sampled using the Akai which was particularly good at stacking and triggering sounds tightly (much better than the Emulators which took a back seat around this time). We would often trigger four or five snares at once for example, with different envelope shapes and filtering on each to make a composite big sound. Each component could be sent from a different output if necessary, so it was very flexible in that way. I remember, during those recording sessions, us having several Akai machines all running simultaneously, with many sounds and loops emanating from each before we committed anything to tape so that we could continually update the sound picture as we built the songs. This particular machine was one of the gang and is still functioning as it should.”