Sequential circuits samplers

I pose this question, to the clearly insane people who constitute 
this group.  I answer the question, myself, to further demonstrate my 
lack of good sense.  I think they can do something to a sound that 
cannot be done by any other means. I have made electronic music since 
1984, and have had the good fortune to program countless sounds, on 
way too many synths too list. The sampling, at first, seemed a novel 
addition to the analog synth set-up. Like dog barks, and "OH YA". 
Then I realized the ultimate "PAD" machine nature of the sampler. 
Pieces of sound fields, like ambient drone-tunes I used to make on 
old tape four-tracks, sound just inspiring when thrown into the 
Prophet 2000. The ability to chop the front and back until it fits 
the new piece is crazy quick and painless. The big difference, of 
course, is when you start crushing the sample in that filter. New 
things always happen. New, strange, and very musical sounds. The 
happy accident is the synthesist's  first trick, and their last 
resort.  The synth is never to be replaced by the sampler, but the 
additions that a good sampler can provide, are endless.  I believe 
the Prophet 2000 to be the best sampler ever produced. Why Sequential 
Circuits went under, is mysterious. They were like alien, electrical 
geniuses. Not unlike that movie with David Bowie, who comes to Earth 
with ideas for amazing devices, and with the help of Buck Henry, gets 
super rich. Then the government steps in and.... Is Dave Smith really 
still alive?  Or are we being duped by the man? Curiouser, and 
curiouser.   ESW

I regard the 2000/2002 as more like synths than samplers- I've always
explained my liking for it, especially to the arms-race types who mock
it's tiny memory & lack of graphical waveform editing, like this: 

that the instrument is designed for one's ears, not one's eyes, & that
it is basically a prophet synth with interchangeable oscillators.

in later years, with vector synthesis, smith tried again to create the
ultimate synthesizer, but it was all too late. the exchange rate & the
cheaper machines from the east effectively killed SCI, though many of
the designers & engineers went on to work for their new masters from
korg, yamaha & the rest.

for me, the prophet 3000 was a step too far in the direction of pure
sampling, while the VS-synths stepped away from the idea of the
build-a-new-sound-from-nothing appeal of the sampler. I loved being
able to grab snatches of sounds & turn them into synth waveforms; as I
mentioned before, there is some kinship with the mellotron here, in
that somehow the sampler sits nicely between an exact reproduction of
the recorded sounds & that analogue unpredictability that one gets
from an old synth.

anyway. it's enough for me that mine still works & that there are
other folks here who feel the same way. I feel like we're somehow in
on a well-kept secret with these machines, which somehow snuck out
when folks didn't really know what a sampler was going to be. 

when the memory got cheaper, we could all afford samplers that would
simply reproduce library recordings of real instruments, & analogue
synthesis hit an all-time low. for me, that was the worst time to be
in electronic music, although it meant that we could pick up moogs &
prophets for next-to-nothing....
only one other machine came anywhere near the 2000/2002 in giving it's
owner such an opportunity to come up with unique sounds based on his
own recordings, & that was the casio/hohner sampler with the "draw
your own waveform" interface.
if you ever got the 2000/2002 hooked up to soundforge, you could do
this anyway.... I used to fill up the last few kB of each disc with a
hand-drawn waveform, looped in soundforge.

dave smith, who also gave us MIDI (lest we forget) is still at work,
creating things like the evolver synths, & with roger linn, effects
devices like the adrenalinn. I wonder if they ever read this stuff or
think about the things they made 20-30 years ago....

duncan.