The AKAIS20 is hands effing down, one of the greatest bits of cheapo sampling hardware ever! I used this little monster for over a decade and laid down many a track utilizing this weapon. Honestly, with the exception of one, single, solitary design flaw affecting even hardware samplers that cost multiple times more , mind you, I would still own and use this item to this very day ( I'll get to the "flaw" later).
The thing about the S20 is that its not like an electribe or one of those garish little boss sp-series samplers with all the flash and fisher price-like gaudy color schemes and a bunch of buttons w/weird names etc. NOPE! Its a real sampler-A real sampler that just works! No crappy effects-no "realtime" control (unless you know what your doing) no buttons or switches anywhere on the unit that say "dj" anything! 4 digit lcd! REAL 4 bit-4 freakin' bit-4BIT sampling! Repeat-You can sample into this machine at 4 bit resolution!
The only thing this machine does automatically is map your sample across the keys. THAT IS AWESOME. MPC4000 does not even do that! Sample a chord from your jazz lp of choice, trim a little and play it! sample a drum loop and speed it up or slow it down simply by playing it on different keys! Saves so much time. The s20 is also probably the cheapest sampler your going to find that lets you map every sample to any midi channel and note number in mere seconds.Really. Seconds. No joke, I knew a cat who controlled one of these with his mpc2000-don't ask why. I have literally sampled everything I can with this thing and its sound cannot be undrestimated. Its actually seems to ADD low end and if you need more than 16 samples and 16 midi channels your probably doin' it wrong!I used this baby in conjunction with a boss dr202 drum/bass machine and that particular combination was my poor mans mpc! and if you need to change a parameter , you don't have to scroll through a menu screen-its all printed on top of the unit!
Now the flaw (oddly enough, also one of the reasons I paid 350 bucks for the thing) - it saves....to floppy disk! In all fairness, that was a great feature back in 1997 but after going through about 700 floppy disks and finding them in every crevice of my house I'd finally had enough. I never really used more than about ten seconds of sampling in any one track (mono) and my maxed out ram would have required me to use about 6 disks if I ever wanted to save that much material at once. Floppy disks are ANNOYING and FRAGILE.I sold the unit with about 260-300 disks for 250 bucks on ebay to some jerky who only wanted the floppy drive to fix his remix16.......I searched in vain for years for some way to get a hard disk or even cf card to work in this thing, but to no avail.
All in all a true pro sampler That I would buy right now if they brought it back out exactly the way it was way back in 1994 (modern storage of course-sd card maybe?).
Here is a track called
NASTY recorded in 2010 ( The AKAI S20 is what I sampled the vocal with and all the triggering tricks are done in real time using the tap button reverse button and pitch bend wheel on my keyboard)
