Composite Video Output Arduino MOD

I commited myself to use my spare quaranTime to finish as many of my unfinished projects as possible and this MOD was one of the best candidates.

Music productivity on the AKAI S900 could be greatly improved by having a better display available and also units with a faulty LCD could benefit from a CV output MOD.


I've used an Arduino Leonardo to develop this mod because Arduino already had ready-to-go CV output options available therefore most of the work was about writing a piece of code to decode signals from the AKAI S900 to the LCD display. These ones are digital data, so most of the stuff is a bounce of 1s and 0s which need to be translated into pixels. As soon as the current buffer changes the old one is shifted up on the screen and the new one displayed; this "memory" feature was quite easy to do.

After some days of testing I was finally able to get something on screen and I'm super excited! However as it's possible to see from the picture, the unit locks as soon as some floppy command is issued. This is quite a Mistery to me, I assumed the display was completely separated from the audio hardware. My guess is that the LCD sends back some sort of  feedback to the OS which in turn is not liking what the Arduino is sending (acually, nothing...). At this point I need to figure out how to fix this problem before considering to release even a Beta of the MOD to the public and I hope to get some help from outside.

Alesis SR-16 Drummachine samples

DOWNLOAD - How to put it on disk

Happy to re-post this samplekit from Andrea Zuppa.


I actually own and love an Alesis SR-16 so this collection is more than welcome!

Welcome to my AKAI S900 blog!

Here we go. It was a while ago that came to me this idea to put all the knowledge I have about this fantastic sampler together in a sort of site/blog/page.

AKAI S900 12bit oldschool sampler

Since it is quite difficult to gather CORRECT information about this device I decided to try to make life of other users easier. I use the AKAI in a modern studio and I've managed to interface it in a quite productive way.

Basically I also hope to meet more enthusiasts to share whatever can be shared about my favorite sampler.

See you soon.

AKAI S900 as a Granular Synthesizer

DOWNLOAD - How to put it on disk


Recently I've done an experiment with granular synthesis, small sampled waveforms looped to obtain a continuos sound.

Roland SH-09 Waveform

I chopped some waveforms from my Roland SH-09 samplekit and MIDI dumped them into the AKAI S900. Usually I care about samples dimension as the S900 has only 720kB of unexpandable memory but sample waveforms, or "grains", are so small in size there's really no worry.

The waveforms sound quite close to the real SH-09, even when layering together the squarewave + SUBOSC the result is similar. What starts to go crazy is when I hit two different keys, blending two sounds at different pitches: the AKAI poliphony starts to show its limits so the harshness is guaranteed.

Being the SH-09 a typical techno machine the resulting sounds are quite oldschoolish but the screaming effects are of course totally different: here it's the AKAI S900 character showing off.