Anyone selling a sampler?

[Darwin]

Need a sampler for my new band, not too clued up on them though but ones I've seen seem pretty pricey.

So anyone got one they care to part with?

[reptilian]

hey dude....

im curious to know what your planning on doing with the sampler.... not to sound funny or anything, but in this day n age you'd be better of buying a cheap laptop n sound card... sampling in the same respect as most things these days has really became something that a computer can do 10x easier and more mobile than the hardware samplers of old....

in saying that, if you keep your eyes peeled you'll find something around £150 upwards on ebay. i used to have a akai S2000 and have used yamaha and roland makes too.... so i can say that most of the 2nd hand samplers you'll find on ebay like the akai would be a good buy...

roland still make nice samplers, http://www.roland.co.uk/prod_room_catdet.asp?id=SP404
thats a nice wee sampler, easy user interface, its a good place to start if you haven't used a sampler before.... it also has a built in seqencer which lots of old school samplers won't have....

i don't know if you've had much experience using pro-audio equipment, if you haven't you might wanna try and find something new like that roland one and pay that bit more, cause the older second hand equipment might well prove to be a headache, as they always have anoying user interfaces, and you normally have to have a bit of knowlage about midi seqencing....

good luck in finding one though... if you have any questions feel free to ask.....

peace

[Campestral]

hi i don't know anything about samplers, it was just what you said about computers being able to sample, is there a case to be made for olde stlye equipment as compared to new technology on computers? are there things you can do with the old stuff you can't with computers and are there certain ways the sound is reproduced on samplers that isn't the same on computers?

when did you use a sampler reptilian? you got any tunes we can hear?

[pANDAS Radio]

For basic samples i find the PC is all i need. It really depends on the setup of the band i suppose.

[Darwin]

Excellent guys thanks for the help!

I'll probably just go for a cheap old laptop, I've got an external soundblaster card aswell so that'll go well.

[reptilian]

Originally Posted by Campestral

hi i don't know anything about samplers, it was just what you said about computers being able to sample, is there a case to be made for olde stlye equipment as compared to new technology on computers? are there things you can do with the old stuff you can't with computers and are there certain ways the sound is reproduced on samplers that isn't the same on computers?

when did you use a sampler reptilian? you got any tunes we can hear?

first off.. tunes you can hear...
if you go to http://www.myspace.com/ovreptilianconstruct
you can hear my rock / metal / nin sort of thing....
i also have http://www.myspace.com/messyteesyandthetvgimik
i haven't got round to hosting anything new, but your welcome to check them out....

i first started using samplers and midi sequencing around 1993, i had this strange little sampler that connected to my atari st. very basic, lots of fun.... after that i used various samplers till around 2002. i've used akai mpc's, roland desk top samplers and a yamaha. but i spent the longest time using a akai S2000, which is a classic in the sampling community...

what i'll say first of is this is just my opinion and I'm sure there are lots of people out there that will disagree,
as for the difference between hardware samplers and computer software samplers, there are differences, though there really shouldn't be.... soft samplers are basically the same beast to my understanding, its just now that computers are powerful enough to run them.

first of there are two types of hardware sampler, samplers with and without sequencers. i mainly have always used computer software (cubase then ableton live) to sequence my music. a sampler with a built in sequencer works in a similar fashion to a drum machine, where you program in sequences and it plays them back, and you chain sequences together to create your ''song''. i feel that these samplers work differently from soft-samplers in general, they have all sorts of groove quantizing functions and a 'tweekability' factor that a standard soft-sampler set up lacks.

as for the other type of sampler, without a sequencer. in function its just a big box that holds your sounds and you trigger them from a external source this can be a computer or keyboard synth or even a guitar if you have midi pick ups and you know how to set up your midi. fundamentally though, there is no difference between them and soft-samplers except in size and weight.... BUT, in practice i think there are different styles of working that emerge in both set ups. neither one better than the other, just different.

the other thing worth noting is that computer software packages don't require you to use software samplers to work with audio anymore. most software like pro-tools, ableton live, cubase, logic and cakewalk will just let you import sound into tracks and turn them into loops. plus a computers time stretching possibilities are far superior to most samplers, which allows to take audio and stretch it to a tempo without changing the audio's original pitch.... with a old school sampler trying to do this causes a grainy distorted effect (which in itself is cool, but not always useful).

in summery, YES... there is a argument for using hardware samplers, and you could possibly come up with some very interesting results, but all in all, in this day and age using a laptop is the way to go... far more bang for your buck!
(I'm quite sure there is alot more realm for discussion as to the pro's and con's of this, but i think i would only be complicating the issue)....

check out... soft-sampler
http://www.native-instruments.com/in...mplingline&L=1

hardware with sequencer
http://www.roland.co.uk/prod_room_catdet.asp?id=SP404

the 'CLASSIC' mpc (which basically created hip hop)
http://www.akaipro.com/mpc5000

and the most interesting take on sampling in a while (which is interesting as its being sold as a keyboard / synth)
http://www.rolandus.com/products/pro...x?ObjectId=847

anyway, hope some of that helps, and even actually makes sense.....

peace

[pANDAS Radio]

Originally Posted by Darwin

Excellent guys thanks for the help!

I'll probably just go for a cheap old laptop, I've got an external soundblaster card aswell so that'll go well.

the laptop that i've used for live stuff is an old piece of shit Toshiba. A whole, mindblowing, 32mb of ram and it's capable of running the incredibly brilliant Windows 98. All the tracks we used were sorted beforehand on my main PC using a combination of programs. I've always found adobe audition to be good for extracting the samples, particularly if they were from films or shows that i could easily get in avi format. We'd then have them as the highest quality wav files we could manage. As long as there was a jacket under the laptop to cut out the vibrations then it worked absolutely perfectly. It still works fine despite having been dropped, thrown and covered in cider --once to the extent that i had to pour it out of the usb and card ports. Even an mp3 player could be used if you were going to have the samples all sorted in advance.

Always fancied having a real sampler but the expense isn't really justifiable while all that stuff is so simple to do using a pc.

[monkey star]

Make sure you don't have a member of the band that likes to jump around if you are gonna use an old laptop as we have had those problems in the past. But a jacket usually works just fine.