The MPC-3000 is a new and improved version of the classic MPC-60. It is a sequencer-sampler powerhouse that functions as the heart of any studio that produces HipHop, Rap, R&B, and even techno. It is usually used as the main percussion groove instrument. Sample your beats, sequence your beats, and edit your beats all on the MPC-3000. It's a great Sampler: 16-bit stereo 44.1Khz sampling with 2 to 16 MB of memory and full editing capability. In fact, its sampling specs are equivalent to most rack-mount type samplers, proving that the MPC-3000 is a professional instrument. It's an excellent Synthesizer: Sixteen dynamic pads with velocity and aftertouch, great drum sets, analog-like VCF filter sweeping with resonance, analog envelope control and 32 notes of polyphony. Except for the drum sounds, it does not feature a built in oscillator or synthesizer engine. But your samples can be shaped and colored by the analog-style edit functions for creating lo-fi sounds, filter swept pads and drum loops, and other strangely modulated effects. This effectively makes the MPC-3000 as powerful and editable as any synthesizer. Used by Dozanova and Omnigod. The SP-1200 was THE drum machine & sampler combo of legendary status among old school rap and hip hop artists from the eighties and nineties. It is similar to today's Akai MPC samplers - it is a sampler plus drum machine. It has limited sampling specs: 22 kHz and 12-bit resolution. However the dirtiness of that sound is great for hip hop and house music. They say it sounds like "old vinyl"... It features groove quantizing and a disk drive for sample storage. As an upgraded version of the 1985 SP-12, the SP-1200 focused on its coolest feature - sampling. The preset drum sounds of the SP-12 were omitted, leaving room for up to 32 user samples of your own custom sampled and edited drum sounds. Although this machine was originally released in 1988, E-mu has reissued them again and again due to popular demand. They continued producing them until they ran out of the SSM filter chips they used, around 1998. It was just too legendary to give up as it was THE beat machine for old-school rap and hip hop! Pictured above is the final reissued version in 1997 with the cooler looking all-black case. With the SP-1200 it's easy and fun to grab those sliders and tune or tweak your sampled drum sounds all around! It is used by Roni Size, Freddy Fresh, Daft Punk, Paranorm, and The Prodigy. The ASR-10 stands for the Advanced Sampling Recorder - a completely digital music production studio. It's a 16-bit sampler that came in both keyboard and rack-mount versions. It shipped with 2 MB of sample memory which could be expanded to 16 MB for a few minutes of stereo cd-quality sampling time. It lets you choose from sample rates of 30 to 44.1 kHz and has all the professional sample editing functions you would expect to find from a pro sampler including autolooping, volume smoothing, normalize, crossfading, and time comp/exp. Even resampling through its effects, EQ, etc. is possible! What's special about the ASR-10 is that it is a sampler using the synthesizer architecture of Ensoniq's classic line of synths from the SD-1 to the ESQ-1. Your samples are stored as part of its WaveSample memory. The ASR-10 can hold 127 WaveSamples, which can also consist of its two multimode digital filters, the LFO, one random noise generator, three envelope generators (hard-wired to the pitch, filter cutoff, and amplitude), and a modulation matrix with 15 routable modulation sources. Up to eight layers of WaveSamples can be combined to create your final sound. In this light, the ASR-10 basically looks like an advanced TranseWave (waveform modulation) synthesizer in which YOU create its WaveSamples! Used by Paranorm and Divine the Origin.