This page was created to provide info on a low cost alternative to the SP1200. It's a dope machine and used by EVERY beat maker on the planet but it costs too much. Of every sampler on the market today there are few that give users the options for creating music in a simple fashion. Sure, there are lots of options out there and if you save up enough money you can get whatever money will buy. Musicians on a budget however, do have low cost alternatives.

Consider this:
Several Janet Jackson albums were made using the Ensoniq Mirage.
Eric Sermon went from using a Mirage to a Roland W30 (workstation that uses S330 sampling engine).
The Akai S900/950 series is still used by many Hip-Hop/RAP/Dance music producers.

Many older samplers can be found at music stores, pawn shops, classifieds, and on the internet for under $500 bucks.
Or, if you have a computer there's a lot of sample based software. However, I have yet to find a piece of software that works exavtly like a sampler. Besides, computers aren't portable and you need huge amounts of disk space for files.

Features
The S-330 is a single space rack mount sampler/poly sample player (multi voice).
8 RCA audio outs.
Total sample time 14.4 seconds. (Sample time divided in half into bank A, and bank B).
WAVE editing utilities include cut, copy, paste, truncate, loop, and wave draw for editing wave forms.
Sonic properties include Hi/Low Filters, 1 VCA, 1 LFO.
Sequencer-Director S-333 software for sequencing.

History
Roland released this sampler after much success with the S-10 Sampling keyboard and The MKS rack mount samplers.
The problem with these early samplers was a limited amount of memory and the use of the infamous Quick Disks.

The S-330 was preceded by the S-220, a two space Quick Disk sampler. I've seen it at of local music shops but don't know a thing about it.

Roland also released their flagship samplers the S-50, S-550, S-750, S-760, S770. These added SCSI support, more memory, and robust editing/sequencing package.

A workstation, the Roland W30, was also released which uses the S330 sampling engine.

All of the S-series samplers accommodate the use of external input devices (ex: mouse) and the use of a CRT or other picture tube display. This has to be the best feature for editing WAVE data instead of using start and end points within LCD displays.

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Page created by Ed Portillo for Occidental Sunrise Productions