E-mu • SP-1200

E-mu SP-1200 Image

The SP-1200 was THE drum machine & sampler combo of legendary status among old school rap and hip hop artists from the eighties and nineties. It is similar to today's Akai MPC samplers - it is a sampler plus drum machine. It has limited sampling specs: 22 kHz and 12-bit resolution. However the dirtiness of that sound is great for hip hop and house music. They say it sounds like "old vinyl"... It features groove quantizing and a disk drive for sample storage. As an upgraded version of the 1985 SP-12, the SP-1200 focused on its coolest feature - sampling. The preset drum sounds of the SP-12 were omitted, leaving room for up to 32 user samples of your own custom sampled and edited drum sounds.

Although this machine was originally released in 1987, E-mu has reissued them again and again due to popular demand. They continued producing them until they ran out of the SSM filter chips they used, around 1998. It was just too legendary to give up as it was THE beat machine for old-school rap and hip hop! Pictured above is the final reissued version in 1997 with the cooler looking all-black case. With the SP-1200 it's easy and fun to grab those sliders and tune or tweak your sampled drum sounds all around! It is used by Roni Size, Todd Terry, Freddy Fresh, Daft Punk, Phil Collins, and The Prodigy.


VISITOR COMMENTS

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booya
Posted 4 days ago
Armen is a NYC based tech whom rack-mounted vintage gear. As far as I can remember he chopped up SH-101's, Juno 106's, TR-909's, SP-12/1200's and TR-808's into rack sized units. Pretty sad IMHO.
George
Posted 15 days ago
anyone know anything about the rack version of the sp.. called 1200 sound. i think its produced by a company called armen
lOOPwhole.net
Posted 31 days ago
This is my personal Favorite peice of all time..its timeless. you can make music on this effortlessly if you have a good background in beat production.
Barno
Posted 144 days ago
there's an application from elektron called C6 (http://files.elektron.se/support/Elektr on_C6_OSX_v1.3b.dmg) that can send and receive samples from the SP1200 on OSX. Something to replace Alchemy...
Fayme
Posted 169 days ago
hi all. An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
I am from Ukraine and learning to speak English, please tell me whether I wrote the following sentence: "Although it is logical to look for the best practise from which to draw your lesson, there."

THX :D, Fayme.
 

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