I got through the other bits of this DLo and have joined a few bits more together, and there are EPROM images of V4.3 and the related one for the EX. They might me from the files section here, I often save things like that in case the site disappears. Now read on.......................
Mode 2
If anything, Mode 2, or ‘Voice Expansion’ mode, is even easier than Mode 1. This mode is for when you need to have thirty-two simultaneous voices on the go, or sixteen in stereo. This is usually the case when you are playing sampled piano. Without sufficient voices, the sustain pedal is very difficult to use without note-stealing becoming obvious. Switching into Mode 2 is as easy as switching into Mode 1. When you load some samples in from floppy disk, the S1100EX will load
first, and the display will invert to tell you what’s going on, and then the S1100 will load the same sample data. When this is done, you basically have a thirty-two voice S1100 at your disposal. All editing procedures will be exactly the same as if you only had an S1100, and when you save data to disk only one set has to be saved because the data is the same in both units.
Advanced Options
Keep in mind that the S1100EX adds a whole new S1100 to your rack and you’ll appreciate that feats like having two different digital effects running at the same time are quite logical. But you may wonder about a couple of other matters, so let me clarify...
Are you a Cue List user on the S1100? The Cue List allows samples to be entered against SMPTE timecode so that they can be played back in sync with a video without having to use an external sequencer or synchroniser of any kind. The S1100 can do this too, but the IB-108 SMPTE reader/generator
card isn’t supplied as standard, as it is with the S1100.
As I said earlier, further S1100EXs can be added to the SCSI chain, but you only benefit from the added multitimbrality that Mode 1 offers.
Although your first S1100EX will add an extra sixteen voices in Mode 2, this doesn’t unfortunately mean that another one would add sixteen more.
The first sixteen notes would be played on the S1100 and the next sixteen on all subsequent S1100EXs.
An interesting trick that the S1100EX’s manual notes is digital mixing for resampling. This isn’t specifically an S1100EX feature since you could do it with an S1100 and a DAT machine, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Here’s how: First you need to have an IB-104 digital interface installed in your S1100 which provides a optical and electrical digital inputs and outputs in addition to the digital output that the S1100 has as standard.
Make up a complex stack of programs on
the S1100EX that you think might be useful if it didn’t use up so many voices, and play it back through the digital output into the S1100’s IB-104 digital input while sampling digitally.
This should give you a sound with several layers but keeping the S1100’s full polyphony. You could do this just as easily through the analogue inputs and outputs adding whatever EQ and processing you need. I suspect that having two samplers around will throw up a lot of possibilities that we haven’t even begun to consider before.
S1100
The S1100, like the S1000 before it, comes with an operating system in ROM (Read Only Memory). This means that there is absolutely no possibility of losing Operating Systems and the Akai it an finding yourself with a very expensive paperweight. Updates to the operating system are supplied on floppy disk, and Akai nobly do this free of charge. Obviously it means better business for them if everyone who uses an
Akai sampler has the latest operating system upgrades to show off to friends, relatives and would-be S1000 or S1100 owners. You can copy this operating system onto as many backup disks as you like but if the worst should come to the worst and you did lose it, then there is always the original version in ROM which will provide all the features you originally bought the unit for, but without the latest frilly bits.
Having to load the latest system from floppy disk may seem like a disadvantage, but actually it is an advantage because it enables you to store your own start up defaults. In my Hands On article about the S1000 I moaned about having to reset my favourite sampling parameters every time I started a sampling session, but a telephone call from Akai informed me of this feature which is either undocumented or is buried so deep in the manual that even an ostrich couldn’t find it. All you have to do is set the S1100 the way you like it, then
save the operating system to disk. Parameters such as default mono/stereo sampling, sample rate and length will all be remembered and reset next time you boot up from this disk.
There is one slight snag involved. If you have the latest version of the operating system in ROM, then the S1100 won’t boot up from the floppy disk with your start up parameters recorded on it. You have to have a disk which is a later version than the ROM. Fortunately, all we S1100 owners will be wanting to upgrade to Version 2.0 soon so there won’t be any problem doing this. S1000 owners with the latest software in ROM may have to wait a little longer.
To operate the S1100 in conjunction with an S1100EX, by the way, you need to have Version 1.30 or later, either in ROM or on disk.
