For a little while I have been staring at my rack where my samplers are mounted, thinking I should be using my S2800 more when producing music. I love the sound and I think the Akai S-series sampler line is just gorgeous to look at. There is something really professional about the way Akai samplers look, if you ask me. But that’s not why I want to use it.
I want to use it more because of the way it sounds in a mix. It tends to easily punch though a busy mix, because the sounds have a certain directness, density and fullness of character, that sometimes seems to be missing when using software samplers like Kontakt or any other software sampler, or even when just playing pack audio from a DAW. Sampling those sounds into the Akai can make it jump out and have an in-your-face punch that stands out in a mix.
But because my S2800 has a floppy drive for saving programs and sounds, and my S01 has a Gotek drive, I figured I could swap the drives and I decided to do so.
Now the S2800 has the Gotek, I can conveniently sample anything in the S2800 and use it in my music or sounddesign en save my sounds to a USB flashdrive if I want to. The main reason I did not use it more often was because of the now quite old and sometimes unreliable nature of floppy disks. Now it has the Gotek, it feels a little bit like a new instrument because of the now reliable and fast storage via USB.
After swapping the Gotek with the floppy drive, the S01 sampler, which now has the floppy-drive, still worked like a charm, and I felt it was nice to restore the S01 to it’s original state with an original AKAI floppy drive. It seemed to work very smooth and quite fast also. The floppy drive was in good shape and looked fairly unused. After putting it in the S01 and using brand new floppy disks, it made almost NO SOUND when loading or saving, and is very quiet.
I will soon share some more info on the Akai S01 in a later post.
“Under the hood“