12 bit sampling was once considered state of the art and the Akai S612 was the first affordable model available. Roger Brown enthuses about this most basic of samplers.

I first came across the Akai S612 in a video repair shop in south London, during the depths of the recession. The owner had bought the premises from the liquidator, and had a few of these 'funny video recorders' and so I picked one up for a song. I had never seen one before, the earliest Akai samplers in my experience at that time were the venerable S900 and S950, and I was intrigued by this 2u chocolate brown unit, with its brightly-coloured knobs and pressure pads.

The first thing I had to do was fit an English kettle plug to the rear, earthing the unit in the process. The Akai was largely sold in America, and these models obviously originated on the other side of the pond, with their two pin plugs and external earth strap. That accomplished, I plugged the unit in and began to discover the joys of mono-timbral, six-note polyphonic sampling.

The sample rate on the S612 is variable between 4kHz and 32kHz, with the length of the sample determined by the rate. So the clarity of 32kHz limits you to a one second sample, while going for eight seconds will result in a 4kHz sample. That's not going to impress the squeaky clean garage crowd, but it's quite serviceable for techno or grunge. The latter rate is actually quite useful for loops, as long as you don't mind losing a bit off the top, and are into exploiting the gutwrenching potential of grainy bass. Setting the rate is done from your keyboard, by pressing the key corresponding to the rate. So, middle C is equivalent to 32kHz and so on down the scale, finishing up at C1 and 4kHz.

Sampling is initiated from the front panel. Pushing the red START pressure pad begins the process. You simply set the input level from a knob to the top left of the START pad. A green LED turns to red as it approaches clipping level, and allows easy monitoring of the sound, and a separate output level knob lets you monitor the sample output aurally. The S612 uses an auto loop function by default, which sets a loop point 10 milliseconds back from the end of the sample. Fortunately this can be easily altered from the front panel. Two sliders control the start and end points of the sample playback, as well as setting the loop points. Reversing a sample is easy and fun from here, simply set the End slider to the beginning of its allowable setting, and the Start slider to the end of its travel. Setting the Loop point is done by initiating Manual Splice from a dedicated button, and then setting the two sliders to the point at which you wish the sample to loop.

Samples can be set to play as One Shot sounds, in which case there is obviously no looping, Straight Looping and Alternating. The latter loop function replays your chosen loop alternately backwards and forwards. You can even overdub as many times as you like, to build up layers of weirdness. Overdubbing does lower the levels of samples already in memory, so you need to adjust the input volume to ensure your overdub doesn't drown out the original sample but does create some interesting effects.

Finally, the S612 features an LFO, whose Speed, Depth and Delay you control from front panel knobs. There's also a Low/High pass filter, and Decay knobs to further mess around with your sample. None of these are recordable over MIDI, so those fascinating filter sweeps will have to be played 'live' whilst you're recording, but they do have an immediacy about them which most modern samplers lack. All in all, the S612 provides a lot of sampling fun for very little money, and if you're lucky enough to pick one up as cheaply as I did, you certainly won't be disappointed. You may even find it opening up new ways of looking at the whole messy business.

Original 12-bit Akai samples:
19: 606 Drum loop
20: Relax... Xaler
21: Woo woo woo woo!
22: Dub bass C3, C2, C1