Akai S950 Part ONE: An introduction to the sampler that changed everything.. |
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The Akai S950 - the second in the S series samplers (after the S900).
A fantastic piece of equipment that changed the way music was produced. a 30 year-old device, it works perfectly and is still a tour de force in today's music Every man and his dog used (and continues to use) the S950 in the studio: - Fatboy Slim, Moby, Skinny Puppy, Depeche Mode, Future Sound of London, Sneaker Pimps, The Bomb Squad, Dr. Dre, DJ Premiere, Prince Paul, Vangelis, Digable Planets, A Guy Called Gerald and Asian Dub Foundation. A pretty diverse and high-brow list.... In this video, I show the basic functions available here - there are many tutorials on how to use the in-depth functions, which would take hours to show! In Part TWO, there'll be the Akai's erstwhile and equally long-lived partner, the Atari ST, working with it to create a seqeunce...watch out for that one - coming soon.. 0:00 - intro 0:38 - keyboard controlling the S950 0:51 - a word about memory... 1:08 - the default sound - the SINE wave. Useful though! 1:28 - "Symphony" 1:48 - loading samples from disk 2:40 - playing samples using keyboard 3:15 - saving memory with different sample rates 3:56 - rhythm playing 4:03 - recording onto the sampler 7:07 - using the sample just recorded, to create things you might not have realised would happen! 8:00 - using external effects to warm up samples 8:45 - using two words from the Fast Show - "great" and "nice".... 9:58 - epilogue - what are "sample rate" and "bit depth"? |