Just got an Akai CD3000XL sampler.

[Manic Harmonic]

Traded my MC-303 for it straight up! It seems like a badass toy, but I'm pretty new to hardware and have no idea how to use it. It doesn't seem as user friendly as the EMU samplers at my school, and it has no samples loaded into it. I've managed to track down some archaic sample CD's for it that it detects, but it's not possible to load my own samples it seems. It has an audio input in the back for sampling.

I've got some CD's to detect in it, but I've yet to attempt to get any sound out of it, I've just been burning the CD's and trying to figure out how to get my samples to work with it.

I'm hoping one of you guys that's used to hardware has some insight on this, the manual is super confusing to me and I'm getting nothing out of it... There isn't much information on this device that I can find.

[mks]

The Akai samplers back then had their own format, so you cannot just load a .wav file into it like you can with a S5000/6000.

You have to sample the sounds yourself directly into the sampler.

[Manic Harmonic]

That's what I figured. I got some sample cd's to work, which is cool... I guess it's time to get a hold of some floppies and start sampling away . Will any floppy disk work, or do I need a special Akai format disk to put samples on it?

[paradigm_x]

you can use any floppies, but youve got to format them as akai.

You can send samples to akais over midi but its slow and painful. The older versions of recycle also used to send over scsi or midi, but they dropped that from the latest versions for some daft reason.

If youve got an old windows 95 box (!) you can also transfer via floppy. Didnt even work on XP tho so highly unlikely to work on anything more recent;

http://mda.smartelectronix.com/akai/

But the joy of hardware samplers is overdriving the inputs slightly, akais are very clean, so transfers are a bit boring.

Your going to need to find the manual, complex, menu driven beasts. Akais site prob has.

Has it got the extra outputs? I love my s2000 but 2 outputs is kinda limiting, and the output board is literally about 20x more than the actual sampler.

Theres also a cool trick for getting HP and BP out of the LP filter, by cleverly adding out of phase samples... search on DOA.

[nowaysj]

What? That is clever.

[paradigm_x]

see, ive even found it for you.

HOW TO DO HIGH-PASS & BAND-PASS FILTERING ON AN AKAI WITHOUT THE FILTER BOARD

1) Create an inverted copy of the sample you want to filter. On an s2000
this will require transferring the sample in question off to a computer editor. (Chris ILL's note: In Sound Forge, invert is in the process menu.)

2) Place the original sample in one zone of a keygroup and the inverted one
in another. It is crucial that they be in the same keygroup as this
technique requires phase-coherent playback, which is only gauranteed inside
keygroups.

3) Make sure that all of the settings in each of the zones are identical.
If all is well, you should not hear anything when you play a note.

4) Set one of the zone's filter offset to +50 and the other's to -50.

5) Now set the filter cutoff for this keygroup to 50. From here, if you
modulate the filter downward, it will act like a regular lowpass (since one
of the samples is completely filtered out), but if you modulate upwards it
will act as a highpass, as one sample will have its filter all the way open
and the lower components of the inverse sample will begin to appear as you
open its filter, cancelling the lower components of the first sample.

A useful way to modulate the filter then, is with a modulation source that
can produce both positive and negative values (i.e. a pitchbender or LFO),
as opposed to something like the mod-wheel or velocity, which only produce
positive values. Try setting a pitch-bender to control the filter. Turn
the depth of the bender all the way to +50. Now, when you bend all the way
down, you get nothing, and as you raise the bender towards its midpoint, you
get a regular lowpass sweep. Raising the bender above its midpoint will
introduce the highpass effect, so you can get a morphing filter kind of
effect.

Another interesting effect is to use LFO2 to control the filter, set to
random waveshape with zero rate, so that each note has a random filter
(could be highpass or lowpass).

Of course, it is also fun to play with the resonance in this situation. One
possible effect beyond the typical resonance type things is to crank up the
res and then turn the master filter cutoff up a bit. This will cause *2*
resonant areas, one at the very top of the range and near the bottom; with a
cutoff of about 75 the bottom resonance brings out a lot of booming bass in
a loop, while leaving the rest of the loop intact. Of course, the high
resonant area will also exist, so be warned that this may bring out any
really high frequencies in the sample as well; to offset this, you may want
to turn down the zone filter offset of +50 to move this peak to somewhere
more agreeable.

This brings us to the second point: Band-Pass filters.

Band-Pass filters

To make a bandpass, set up the patch the same way, but don't turn the filter
offsets all the way up to +- 50. This is convenient because you can create
bandpasses of arbitrary width; regardless of resonance, simply by tweaking
the difference between the filter offsets. Getting this method to sound
just right for a given sample or effect may require tweaking the master
filter cutoff and then setting the offsets asymmetrically so that you don't
have a dea zone at the top/bottom of the frequency range where it stops
acting like a bandpass and acts like a highpass/lowpass. also, keep in mind
that messing with the resonance will still cause dual peaks, so you can get
some wacky bandpass shapes this way.

More fun stuff

Now that you are bored of playing with the new filters, try messing with the
vel>offset parameter in one of the zones. This will throw the sample in
question off-phase depending on the velocity you play with, which can result
in some funky velocity-dependent bandpass/highpass effects.

Also, notice that phase-coherency seems to degrade during the release of the
notes (set the filter offsets of the zones back to 00 and the filter cutoff
back to 99 and try playing. You should hear nothing until you release the
note, then you hear a quiet release). Try using a long release and see what
you can get (I don't gaurantee it'll be cool, but you might find something
weird).

Also, bear in mind that this method will cut into polyphony as you are using
two samples for each voice.


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try this out, you won't be disappointed!

[deadly_habit]

yea you're gonna need a scsi card to transfer samples

[Manic Harmonic]

Thanks for that info, that sounds really cool. Yeah, it's got multiple outs. I might be able to track down a windows 95 computer but at that point I think t starts to be more trouble than it's worth. Thanks guys!

[phishu]

Get MESA, should work on XP without issue.

Make a dual boot PC, one being Win XP, the other your current OS.

Install a SCSI card and get a SCSI cable.

Download MESA v2.2: http://www.akaipro.com/contentmgr/showd ... hp/id/1757

Connect sampler to PC via SCSI

You can now transfer data and control all sampler features using a GUI on the PC.

[Eridu]

congrats, now you have to waste your time learning a piece of hardware that performs the same actions you can already do with your pc.

[mks]

No, they have a certain sound. I'll admit it's easier to work with samples on a computer, but you can't deny that there is a certain sound to hardware samplers because of their convertors.

What kind of soundcard do you have? Because that is your sound. All of your synths, vst's, daw are all going through that one soundcard and are probably being colored by it.

[Eridu]

I knew that you were gonna say that and there is some truth to it, but to me its not enough to justify me spending more money, time and space in my workplace. Believe me, if I had the money and space for hardware I would be collecting synths like stamps.
If a track is good, then the soundcard giving it its particular color or quality is just a matter of taste, bad track will still be a bad track no matter through what you play it through.
If you have awesome tracks and you feel there`s no more way to improve them by arranging composing or mastering then I guess its logical to look in hardware...

[Disco Nutter]

@ Eridu, you have to have in mind the different way people work with hardware, which generates different ideas. It has its psychological part.

[phishu]

Get MESA, should work on XP without issue.

Make a dual boot PC, one being Win XP, the other your current OS.

Install a SCSI card and get a SCSI cable.

Download MESA v2.2: http://www.akaipro.com/contentmgr/showd ... hp/id/1757

Connect sampler to PC via SCSI

You can now transfer data and control all sampler features using a GUI on the PC.

just to update on this, MESA will work under Windows 7, you do not need an earlier version of windows to communicate with the sampler.
there's a full walk through here