E-mu • SP-1200
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.
I gave my MPC60mk1 with all upgrades for it and sold it again for 950 EUROs.
I saw and felt that the SP 1200 is cool, but in that short time I didn´t figure out all the functions I needed to create a beat, especially the sequencer functions are quite different from the MPC.
Another thing are the buttons of the SP 1200: the type of buttons they used for building it is not a good choice, because they get worse during the years. I sold my SP 1200, because it already started to miss my button-presses and I didn´t want to see it die under my hands.
But I really believe that it can be the best tool for one to get inspiration and to be creative, it just wasn´t meant for me.
Cheers
Ezz