The Akai S5000
	The S5000 took over from the industry standard S3000 range and offers many features including a much more user friendly graphical operating system, more powerful filtering, more notes, polyphony. The list goes on. Now superseeded by Z's and MPCs it's possible to pick these up at a great price!

I use an S5000 with a USB interface. I straight away upgraded it with 128 Meg of memory (2x64 M simms) so now it has 160 Meg total (including the 32 M onboard). I think this is suffficient, as I will not be using massive multisamples of the perfect piano or anything.

Upgrading the Akai S5000
Picture	Description
	This is the back panel of the Akai. Note the room for extra ports and digital ADAT interfaces. Two Midi busses is a nice idea - one day I may use this. The USB card is visible on the back.
	This is the inside view - everything is laid out very neatly. Note the USB expansion card I have fitted in the top right slot. The standard memory module slots are at the bottom. I have since added the FX card in its dedicated slot at the top just below the rear SCSI ports.

Much fun was had buying the correct memory as the S5000 can only take simms up to 64 meg each and these are now fairly rare as PCs all tend to use the larger format DIMMS nowardays. Looking through various PC suppliers it was obvious they were going to be very expensive to buy and were in short supply. 

In the end I went to a computer fair (the likes of which operate around London on many Sunday mornings) and to my delight found a supplier who has loads of the right kind of memory all brand new and at a relatively cheap price! 72 pin EDO SIMM memory - I have been using this memory for a while now and it's been fine.

The Akai is an excellent work horse yet I feel I am hardly using it to its full potential as yet. Its great for off-loading drum sounds to and using those excellent filters on various loops but it is a way of working I am still getting used to - where you start off with having to prepare and load up the sound before you use it as opposed to having all the sounds ready for you as in a synth.

The USB is indispensible for this and its possible to load the entire memory to PC, visa versa (which I do for every song) edit samples remotely on the PC screen and download them for detailed processing in a program such as Cool Edit 2000.

I have found the 5K to be very stable in use and not had a single lock up as yet, in fact the only minor irritation so far, is when editing a program over the USB it switches into program mode so if you are playing a composition which spans channels in multi mode you have to keep switching back to hear things properly! 

EB20 effects unit 

I have at long last I have upgraded the S5000 to have onboard effects.

This has given the unit much more in the usability department. Beforehand I was relying on outboard effects but this proved unflexible. Now it is possible to assign samples individually among the 2 stereo FX busses and 2 extra reverb/chorus busses.

The effects are great and allow all the usual delay/distortion/phase/flange etc chain plus some extras I have yet to find a use for. The pitch shift function seems quite cool - rather like time stretch but real time.

Now I am using the Akai more heavily and sampling the other instruments and then playing them as samples. I'd definitely recommend this upgrade.

I got hold of this from Music Village in London (one of my musical haunts) at a good price and if you are deliberating, hurry up - I got the feeling they were in increasingly short supply! Let me know if you know different :)

 
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