Expanding Digitakt with vintage rack sampler

How bad of a idea is that? Does anyone of you do that? On paper it sounds nice, stereo sampling and playback, polyphony, multitimbrality, but how cumbersome would that be? I’ve never used old rack samplers, watched some videos on popular ones, the workflow doesn’t look that bad, but maybe i don’t know something? Btw searched youtube for such combo, and it seems like nobody is doing it this way.

I asked the approximatly same question

From what I remember, it doesn’t worth it. If you are used in modern workflow like Digitakt you will be disapointed.
The “sound quality” of vintage sampler can be achieved with some vst plugins.
You can try to use a free VSTHost or a DAW with Overbridge to resample your loop with old sampler grain like RX950 or cassette simulator, etc…

If you want to add a stereo sampler to your workflow, you should look at an Octatrack or a modern MPC.

still waiting for proper modern box to expand DT. Elektron should make one with total integration into DT os.

1 Like

The Model Samples offers 6 more tracks of sample for £200 used. Pan them left and right to get 3x stereo.

Surely there isn’t a better deal when it comes to Digitakt expansion, short of buying a 2nd Digitakt?

It is a step backwards in time, technology-wise, in more ways than one. I have (and have had) a number of vintage samplers, and most/many of them do not support any common formats for sample transfer or sample storage. If you’ve never used SCSI or disk imaging software before, you’re going to have to get into that.

Some of the later models supported DOS-formatted floppies and DOS-formatted ZIP drives for importing WAV and AIFF files… but I’ve got plenty which don’t. If you don’t care about import/export, and want to sample everything fresh, that’s fine … the workflow may be fun… but you may still need like a ZuluSCSI module hanging off the back or installed inside to store the samples… and learn the arcane operating systems and how they store their files… & slicing etc is a completely different kind of adventure…

Yeah, this. I love my Roland S-760 and Peavey SP and Ensoniq Mirage and etc., but I also keep a fleet of vintage computers around which can interface with them. It’s lunacy. The Model:Samples is so immediate and sounds so great.

I have an s5000 and an MPC 2000 xl that I used with Elektron stuff sometimes.

It depends on what you are going for. If you want a fast, Elektron-like workflow then I agree with the other posters here, that you should skip any older samplers.

However, if you’d enjoy digging around in old operating systems and seeing sampler features that time forgot, it can be fun.

For example the MPC has an essential feature that I’ve never seen on any other sampler: in one-shot mode the decay envelope starts at the end of the sample and ramps “backwards”. So it’s decay, but it also works as a “de-click” envelope. Chopping up a beat (which one has to do by hand) and then using this kind of envelope is incredibly expressive and way better than anything else I’ve used.

I’m not sure I can point to a single killer feature of the s5000 along these lines, but there’s a ton of interesting stuff in there, from notch filters to arbitrary offline timestretch and resampling, to detailed loop-point editors that can give you all kinds of funky buzzes and zippy sounds.

Also both these machines sound great. And once you’ve got programs in them you like, they work very well in a modern studio, they never crash, you can blast them with tons of MIDI data, ins and outs are super clean, etc.

In a way it’s refreshing to use an s5000 after using modern gear — it’s built like a tank and there’s nothing “pro-sumer” or cheap about it. It’s huge, heavy, and really luxurious. But yeah, you will have to work more slowly on them.

1 Like