HOW TO: Use the AKAI S900 as an effect unit

Most of you are lazy, but still want the AKAI sound in your music. The solution is simple: run an external signal through the AKAI: LINE-IN -> MIX-OUT

Configure the frontal knobs as follows:


..and connect the MIX OUT to a channel on your mixer.


From now anything can be sampled into and played back from the AKAI in real time, giving its conversion character to any audio source you will feed and without the hassle to sample, edit, cut, program, save into floppies etc.

The beautiful is that you can still use the other 8 outputs for any other sample to be played back. Or you can feed one of this samples again into the AKAI-FX.

Not to mention feedbacks...

Enjoy :)

15 commenti:

Anonimo ha detto...

That's 2 legit, 2 legit 2 quit-

Unknown ha detto...

Not true. No conversion is done!

Anonimo ha detto...

yes it is. it colors the sound. what do you think those inputs are for?

Anonimo ha detto...

It colours the sound, but it's not the same as sampling. It's more of a 'pass through' effect than the entire effect itself. The inputs/outputs are there so the sound can be monitored, not be used as an effect.

Still, great blog, keep up the good work!

Unknown ha detto...

kwality is right. Of course the sound will be colored, but it´s not the sound of the Akais ad/da converters since the audio isn´t converted to digital and back to analog.
If the s900 was an effect unit, you´d be able to use the filters and other fx in real time, but you can´t.

KONEY ha detto...

It's not meant to be an effect, this is a trick of course, but it works nicely! If you feed a signal it comes out different, so it's an effect even if they didn't build it as one :)

Are you sure that there's no ADDA conversion? I should do some tests, like set frequency to something very low to understand if the sound changes...

Chewo ha detto...

Its not realy working - of course the signal passes through, but no 12bit conversation! The signal just runs trough without beeing quantized to 12bit whether converted to another khz level... Shure sounds different - but not like th final proces. Love your page

KONEY ha detto...

Sad to hear...anyway a signal fed into the Akai sounds great!

Thanx a lot.

Anonimo ha detto...

Ciao, interessante il post relativo all'utilizzo della macchina come monitor per farci passare il suono, però effettivamente come veniva detto non lo si processa a 12bit utilizzando i famosi convertitori...tuttavia continuo a chiedermi se una volta campionato dei suoni via akai e li ricampiono via scheda audio (se pure a 24) nn vado in qualche modo ad alterara la pasta sonora iniziale.

P.S. Gran bel blog, siamo pure concittadini essendo anche io di Venezia.

Anonimo ha detto...

According to the service manual, it only passes two op-amp preamps, doesn't even pass the input sampling filter or any AD/DA, would have been nice if it did though!

Anonimo ha detto...

the signal is purely analog, there is no conversion, if you look at the schematics of the s900 you can see that there is a direct analog connection from input to output monitoring..

Unknown ha detto...

From: https://www.soundonsound.com/sos/nov08/articles/itbrauer.htm "I also sent the basses to an Akai S612 sampler. A friend of mine turned me on to doing this. I don't use it as a sampler, but as a distortion device. If you put the Akai in microphone mode and you overload it, you get really nice warm distortion that you don't really notice, but it sounds good. "

Prince.Cobra ha detto...

To test this you would set feqs high above the nyquist sample rate and check for aliasing of the freq, if it’s being converted to digital then back to analog it won’t be able to properly read the test frequency and show aliasing on the waveform. Responding to a post from 2008 in 2021… hope your still alive my friend

Prince.Cobra ha detto...
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