Sampler for keyboard sounds

[jmars11]

So I really enjoy the abbey road keyboard refills for Reason (especially the mellotron) but I want to play those keyboard sounds live without bringing my computer and rigging up a keyboard to it with some crappy midi-usb cable.

Lookin for a rack sampler that I could sample all of the key sounds from and then assign to different keys on a midi keyboard (my DX7). Samplers I've been looking at:Akai S2000, S5000, S6000, Yamaha A3000. Would any of these samplers be able to do that? Is one of these better? Any other suggestions?

Also, since these samplers are older, would I need some retro computer/cd drive/hard drive to funk with the setting and load samples? or would this be simple to do with a modern setup (Macbook Pro-- Pro tools 8, reason, mbox, midi keyboard)?

Thanks

[gcoudert]

I can't speak for the Yamaha but as an Akai user, yes, the samplers you are considering are definitely capable of mapping sounds across the keyboard. You may need to invest in external storage (external SCSI HD or SCSI Zip drive).

The Akai S2000 is an underrated sampler in my opinion. I once had one and I used the Akai MESA software (buggy but good) to transfer samples from my PC to the sampler, which I then saved to an external Zip. S2000s are dead cheap nowadays but they sound good although editing from the front panel is a nightmare. MESA 2 is available on the Apple Mac platform, I believe. You'll need a SCSI card and cable too. Forget about sending samples over MIDI; it'll take forever just to transfer a mono closed hi-hat sample!

Have you considered an Akai S3000-series? They're similar to the S2000 but with a larger display.

Also, the more RAM, the better but you'll find that many Akai samplers of that generation are limited to about 16 or 32Mb. I believe the S5000 or 6000 can take much more. You could also consider an E-mu Esi4000 (cheap), which is essentially a repackaged Emulator III and can be expanded to 128Mb using SIMMS RAM cards such as those you find in a PC.

My only slight concern is your keyboard. If you have a 2nd generation DX7, you're fine. The Mark 1 DX7 (1983) keyboard's velocity is limited to about 118 so you won't be able to access the upper velocities of your samples.

[jmars11]

Thanks for your suggestions

I guess I was unaware of the velocity issue with the DX7. I do have the mark 1. So what sort of problems will that cause when triggering samples??

[ninja6485]

on the s5000 you can adjust the velocity sensitivity, and i think turn it off completely, though i havn't paid enough attention to that feature to give a completely certain answer(on the off completely part). at the very least you should be able to match the known velocity of the keyboard with a velocity setting on the sampler. worst comes to wost, just turn up the volume on the sampler. i would be surprised if lacking the upper regions of velocity lead to any noticable decrease or change in sound quality, especially live.

that being said, where you would run into a limitation is in the case that you have a patch that plays different sounds triggered by different velocity levels, in which case any sounds that would trigger only when a key is pressed with a velocity of over 118 wouldn't trigger, and so you would have to go in and adjust that setting to get that patch to work correctly, which is about as complicated as trimming your nails.

so basically, don't f**k worry about it. if no one told you that you were missing, what, 7/125 velocity steps in the upper region, you probably wouldn't have noticed.

[madtheory]

IME a Mac Book pro is more reliable than a hardware sampler. IMO the only reason to use a hardware sampler is because of unique sound quality. Mapping all your sounds to the sampler would be time consuming unless you get Redmatica Autosampler.

Your laptop would be very happy with one of these:
http://www.rackmountsolutions.net/SKB_Studio_Flyer.asp

[novielo]

s5000 and s6000 can go up to 256mb of ram. also if you can get the usb card it's very usefull to upload stuff and make your program, also you can have up to 16 output + adat ouput. for these reasons i kept that sampler (s6000) instead of an emu4000 and a a4000. the effect on the a4000 are great but i find it much more usefull to have a boss vf-1.

[meatballfulton]

In my experience Reason will run just fine on a cheap laptop...I ran it for years on an old Toshiba with just a 1.6G Celeron and 768MB of RAM. I was so cheap I just patched the sound out of the headphone jack and it was fine but for live use, buying an audio/MIDI interface would probably be a better idea.

Downsides: you can buy a hardware sampler for less money than a laptop plus interface But then you have to spend the time doing all the sampling yourself (looping...yuck) unless you can find some good third party sample libraries.

[madtheory]

Ya that's what I said too...