E-mu SP-1200

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E-mu SP-1200 is a classic sampler released August of 1987 by E-mu as an update of the SP-12. It became famed for its gritty texture and ability to simulate the sound of vinyl recordings. The SP-1200 became an icon of the golden era of hip-hop due to its ability to construct the bulk of a song within one piece of portable gear, a first for the industry, which reduced studio costs and gave groups more creative control over their own sound relying less on studio engineers. Designed to be used as both a drum sequencer and sampler in one, the SP-1200 features 22 kHz (roughly half the fidelity of a compact disc) and 12-bit resolution; along with the idiosyncratic SSM2044 filter chip these machines were fitted with make for a dirty, gritty sound. One of the attributes of the SP-1200 is its extremely small amount of memory, roughly 10 seconds. The limited sampling time was overcome within the late 80s Hip-Hop production circles by sampling 33 1/3 records at 45 rpm with an additional pitch increase, then replaying the sample from the SP1200 at a much slower speed (by the use of 'Multipitch' and/or 'Tune/Decay' edit functions). This in effect, "tricked" the sampler into expanding its total sample time. By the early 90s, nearly every working Hip-Hop producer had adopted this technique as industry standard until younger producers began buying newer samplers such as Akai's MPC60, which came with a much higher bitrates and more sampling time.

1 Features
2 Differences from the SP12
3 Miscellaneous
4 See also
5 References

[edit] Features

From the SP1200 Overview webpage:

“The SP1200 can store up to 100 patterns, 100 songs and has a 5000 note minimum memory for drum sequences. It also has a mono mix output and eight individual outputs, MIDI in/out/thru, SMPTE sync, and a metronome output.”

There is one button that allows you to select between banks A, B, C and D giving the user easy access to each of the 32 sounds. The front panel contains several LED lights, buttons and eight volume and pitch faders for each sound in the selected bank. Below each fader is a large button to initialize the sound, or select the sound for editing, and a switch to turn the trigger's velocity sensitivity off or on.

The sequencer works in the familiar pattern-style of placing short consecutive sections of samples into a song. The user can easily add swing quantisation and tempo changes. The sequencer can sync the tempo to SMPTE, MIDI or analogue clock pulses. Also, if one wanted, the sequencer can synchronize the tempo to a tapping finger with the 'tap tempo' button."^[1]

[edit] Differences from the SP12

Unlike the SP12, the SP1200 does not contain ROM based samples; all samples are stored in volatile RAM and loaded from floppy disk. The AD/DA converters remain 12 bit, as 16 bit converters were still expensive and found only on high-end gear, such as the contemporary E-Mu Emulator 3 (EIII), which had a list price over $10,000 USD. Maximum sampling time was doubled from the upgraded SP12 Turbo, to over 10 seconds, but the maximum single sample was 2.5 seconds. The sample rate was reduced slightly also (from 27.5 kHz to 26.04 kHz) to maximize memory usage. The SP1200 retains all of the I/O capabilities from the SP12, minus the cassette output.^[1]