AKAI S3000XL

AKAI S3000XL

The AKAI series of samplers from the 80's and 90's has always fascinated me, but I suppose when they were hot, I was so young that I could only dream about owning such an awesome piece of equipment. Well... Times have changed and a few  months ago I was able to pick up one of these beauties for the ridiculous price of 50 EUR!!

This unit has got floppy drive, scsi port, s/pdif, 8 individual outs and 16 Mb ram. It is in excellent condition and I'm generally very happy with it.

Anyway, since I'm not really into collecting things just for the sake of owning them, I had to consider how I would actually put the unit to good use.

Here are the main reasons:

• My Audio interface (NI Komplete Audio 6) has 6 Inputs and two of those Inputs are digital. The S3000XL has s/pdif in and out, so I figured it would be a cheap way to get two extra inputs. This could come in handy when tracking external MIDI sound modules in Cubase or Logic. I haven't gotten around to trying this out yet, but there is no reason it wouldn't work. And the S3000XL is so much cooler (and cheaper) in a rack than some digital to analog box.
• Let's not forget that the S3000XL is a really good sampler with very nice envelope and filter sections, even though my unit does not have the optional extra filter card. Since my Mac Mini, although it is a 2013 model, is not exactly a powerhouse when it comes to audio production, I thought it would be an advantage to let it do some work as a drum machine sampler, instead of a virtual sampler, using up a lot of cpu power and ram. So whenever I feel like using some of those classic TR-808 or TR-909 sounds, I'll put a floppy in the S3000XL and let it do it's thing.
• I like analog synthesizers from the 70's and early 80's but at the moment I only own a Roland JX-3P analog synthesizer. And to be honest I cannot justify spending those insane amounts of money on that kind of equipment (being the father of three!!). Again, here comes the AKAI S3000XL to the rescue! You can always find some samples of those sounds and transfer them to the AKAI. I know, it's not the real thing, but maybe it's the next best thing. For me, somehow it beats having those sounds in the computer... By the way, transferring stuff to the AKAI is a different story all together and I'll come back to that topic later.