Akai S20 wierdness

[Gordonjcp]

Y'know, you could desolder the chips off a scrap SIMM and make a pluggable bend controller...

[noiseybeast]

I might end up JUST doing the clock mod.  I hate making leads off of SMD stuff.  I'll definitely put it up when finished (ugly pictures and all).  I've been putting LTC1799's in almost everything I own these days, I'll have to put together a demo of my otherwise unbent pieces:  Electribes EA-1, ER-1, EM-1 and now this sampler.   I love that it's tempo independent for midi.

Amazing how low you can clock it down.  I had the clock crystal down to the Kilohertz range and it was still sampling.

I don't know why more old school samplers didn't do that:  Sample at a relatively low rate and then use pitch shifting to effectively increase your sampling time with a quality trade off.  You get a lot more time and for grit, it's pretty useful.  I know that a lot of manufacturers were trying to get as high quality samples as possible, but it's still interesting.

[Gordonjcp]

If you listen to a lot of early Public Enemy and similar stuff. you can actually hear the aliasing whine on samples.  Listen to the main hook of "By The Time I Get to Arizona", for instance.

Now, what they did there to squeeze longer and longer samples into the cramped memory of the samplers of the day was, they played the record in at too high a speed, or played it in off tape at twice the speed.  Then when it was pitched down they had it at the right pitch albeit with reduced quality.

[noiseybeast]

I've finished the S20 mod and finally recorded a demo of what it can do:

Akai S20 modded with an ltc1799 pitch mod

[nochtanseenspecht]

 :othat's impressing !

[noiseybeast]

Thanks!  I normally hate thread jacking, but I had forgotten that youtube links automatically add the video in the forum software.

Gordon, you're suggesting to completely desolder all of the memory + related chips off of a simm and just connect bend points to the equivalent address points?

[Gordonjcp]

Yes, just wave a heat gun at it and the chipsshould just fall off.  You can then solder to the pads, or make a SIMM with jumpers for "preset" bends ;-)