Akai S950

Description

Physically, an Akai S950 is almost indistinguishable from an S900. It has the same green LCD, the same eight Page buttons, the same cursor, and the same five knobs. Although the disk drive looks identical to the Akai S900’s, the S950 accepts both double-density (DD) and high-density (HD) floppy disks. You can load disks while playing, too — a feat the S900 is not inclined to perform. Also unlike its predecessor, the Akai S950 provides double-speed MIDI communication for transferring data to a sample-editing program on an external computer.

The Akai S950 operates much like an S900 does: the sample record pages take you through setup procedures one step at a time. Although the lofty 48 kHz rate offers extra sparkle, it also reduces your maximum sample time at full bandwidth. Using the S950’s pretrigger recording, you can record razor-sharp attacks. If you really want to get serious, you can process individual hits from the S950’s eight outputs.

The S950 was the first Akai sampler to implement time-stretching, enabling you to alter sample length without altering the pitch. Considering the S950’s continued popularity as a drum-loop sampler, that capability proved crucial to its success. If you stray too far from the original sample length, recordings begin to sound a little metallic and artificial, which might be the result you’re aiming for.

The Akai S950 has stood the test of time well; many people have continued to use theirs through the 1990s and beyond. For Steve Hackett’s album There Are Many Sides to the Night (Caroline Records, 1994), I spliced a scratchy old solo violin sample from the S950 onto the attack of a lush strings patch from the Korg Wavestation. Perhaps more resourcefully, Norman Cook (aka Fatboy Slim) uses a transposed S950 Tone Program mixed in with an Oberheim Matrix-1000 for many of his sub-bass sounds. S950 drum loops, grainy and grungy in all their 12-bit glory are particularly hip in hip-hop.

A vast range of Akai and third-party sounds are available for the S950. Impressively, the S950 is downwardly compatible with S900 disks and upwardly compatible with S1000 disks. Although the S950 converts the S1000’s 16-bit data to 12 bits and stereo to mono, most samples transfer extremely well.