Yamaha A3000 Sampler

I got this when it first came out, so I still have OS 1.0. you can get the upgrade from you're dealer but it's a pricey($100-150 USD) EPROM. anyway, this sampler is far easyer to use than any other unit I've try'd(EMU, akai, ect...) everything is right there on the screen and on the editing matrix. theres is a slight learning curve for those who are used to EMUs or AKAIs, because this is laided out differently(much more like a synth than a sampler). but as soon as you get around that its great. no parameter is more than a button press and 2 knob turns away. which makes it very easy to get what you want very quickly. I give it 9, only because of the learning curve.

it has 64 notes of poly, so don't worry about running out. the output board is a must, and includes digital outs(for all you guys that have digital mixers). and you can set the knobs to transmit MIDI control messages too! so you can use it as a real time controler for modules and such. very handy live.

the sound quality is right up there with the top of the line EMUs and AKAIs. although not 48khz(it's only 44) its still very good. the onboard FX are great. some are a bit cheesy (like the turntable noize, ect...) but 90 percent of them are very useable, and don't require to much tweeking to get what you want. and you can change the sampling rate, all the way down to 5k! and theres a lofi setting that takes off the lowpass filter on the 22, 11, and 5khz rates for some extra grit. which is very usefull for dirtying up the preset drums on you'r synth.

I've never had any really problems with it. it lags a bit when you have alot of sounds playing at once, but thats reportedly been fixed in the newer OS upgrades.

all my questions where answered within' a week, which is very good for a company the size of yamaha.

I'll never part with mine. I know it so well know now that there isn't anything I can't do on it. incredible value for money, especialy now since the price keeps goin' down(it was $1800 when it came out, I got mine on sale). get the latest OS though, they've added alot more and fixed alot of the bugs.

I've got version 2, fully expanded with 128MB, 2 Gig hard disk, output board. It's quite easy to use; the thing that takes time is actually finding your way around the menus. The thing that really pisses me off about this sampler is the 5 knobs on the front. Every paramater is immediatley controllable from these knobs - a good thing. However the knobs on mine are extremely crap. Sometimes I'll be turning one to the right and the sampler thinks I'm turning it left. When it repeatedly does this I'm sure you can imagine it's very frustrating.
Also the screen is small and the disk format is crap - you can't stack folders inside other folders so often you end up with 100's of samples in one folder and it can only show them one at a time so it takes ages to scroll through them to find the one you want.

Good effects. Good filters. Good polyphony. In fact all the features are good. I've got the expansion board which adds digital in/out, which has proved very useful.

The sound from this sampler is NOT very good. When outputting a sine wave from each output, they all sound different and some have some kind of distorted tone present. Basically, whenever an output is 'open' then there is a noise. This sucks when you're using a reverb, say, because the noise at the end of the reverb's tail is louder than the reverb itself! Maybe I've got a dodgy one, but Yamaha couldn't figure it out and the local repair shop is crap so I guess I'm stuck with it like that. It's a shame because it makes it nearly unusable in the studio, and otherwise the effects are very good.

It's never let me down apart from the outputs. Except for the hard disk which I have installed sometimes throws a wobbly - I don't know if this is the A3000's fault but I think it is. It doesn't have a very good disk management system, so when you've saved and 'erased' a lot of stuff it becomes really slow and sometimes crashes. A total re-format sorts it out but.....

The technical support people at Yamaha UK are very helpful and although they haven't been able to solve all of my problems, they've tried to. So I like them!

I'd like to try the new A4000 and A5000 as hopefully Yamaha have sorted out some of the problems with the A3000.

Sound on Sound (the mag) said it has a difficult to use operating system, but I think it is actually very easy to use. The menus are all very logical. And it is also very straightforward to sample something: just go to the REC page, press GO, and then press START.

Well, my A3000 v2 has an output expansion board and 64 mb ram and has a polyphiny 0f 64, which is much better than the standard Akai S3000XL. The a3000 has also a lot of filters, like LPF, HFP, BFP and much, much more. You can also easily assign midicontrollers to, for example, Filter cutoff by just selecting filter cutoff in the controller menu and pressing the knob. Then you can move you pitchbender, and the A3000 recognises it as the pitchbender!
The onboard effects are also great, especially the special effects (lofi, modtech, jump etc). The reverbs are also nice, but a little, well, cold or something..

The sounds are just as good as the soundsource you're sampling from. The effects are good. The only minor problem is that the Output Expansion is a little low on volume, but if you have a descent mixer it is not a problem!

Perfectly reliable, it never crashed during the period I have him (5 months now).

Never dealt with it...

I think the A3000 v2 is the best sampler around (for it's price).
It's really a pro sampler!
If you are looking for a good, allround sampler, look for the A3000 v2!

I`ve been using a V2.0 model with output expansion, 98 Megs of Ram and external CD-Rom + harddisk for about 2 months now. Its matrix user interface is very easy and fun to work with; you hardly ever lose your way. The 5 realtime control knobs are great for getting "in touch" with parameters like cut-off frequency, pan, volume or ADSR envelopes (far better than having to enter values by pushing knobs in single increments/decrements). The feel of the knobs (they`re opto-controlled) are a matter of taste as they`re quite sluggish and don`t feel stable. The LED is very readable (especially in darkness) and IMHO offers enough information (the lack of a graphic display is not an minus at all). What really is an advantage of this box is that the Yamaha guys seem to have designed it from scratch with lots of innovative ideas without the necessity to maintain downward compatibility to older models and thus many of the traditional junk features Akai and Emu are still sticking to.

-64 note polyphony -2 Meg Standard (way too little nowadays) upgradable to 128 Megs using 4x32 Meg 72 pin modules (vs. 2x64 Meg with the Emu ESI-4000) caution: the A3000 is very peckish about RAM modules; try them at a computer store or let your music stuff dealer do the job. -16 part multitimbral -3 Effect processors that can be chained in different configurations or be used in parallel mode with the possibility to rout the effect output to individual outputs. Sound quality is good in general, although I find most of the praised lo-fi effects pretty useless. Reverb algorithms and modulations are nice though. Really aggressive distortion effects. Very good pitchshifter/beatchanger. Eciter and compressor. The problem with the effects, however, is, that since these are insert effects, you can only determine the dry/wet ratio globally for all samples passing through the effect but not for each sample individually. There is, however, a rather complicated workaround for this. You can find it in the excellent FAQ at A3KCentral (Teklab homepage). -Pseudo-effects on sample-level: detune and de-phase, very useful to fatten up a weak mono sample -built-in SCSI interface (external 50 pin sub-d half-pitch jack, internal SCSI connection using 50 pin internal flat cable, option for internal 3,5' SCSI harddisk (built-in power supply) One big minus about the A3000: its SCSI interface is reeeaaally slow. When saving or loading data via CD-Rom or harddisk I feel warped back to 1990 working on a slow 30 Meg harddisk on a 12 MHz 286 Pc. I use a 6x Toshiba CD-Rom drive and a 1.2 Gig Quantum harddisk in external enclosure. Although the CD-rom drive is capable of reading about 900 KB/s and the Quantum HD about 2000 KB/s, both drives read about 400-500 KB/s when used with the A3000. Saving time takes place at about half of that. So only go for the A3000 if this is not too much of a problem (I`ve got used to it). -SCSI import of Akai, Emu and Roland formats, Floppy import of Dos-formatted disks containing wav and aiff files, Floppy export of aiff files -capable of SMDI sample transfer to and from a Computer equipped with a SCSI interface using sound-editing software like Wavelab or Soundforge -16 Filters with resonance (one of the best features of the A3000 -they sound great, I mean aggressive and harsh, yet transparent) -individual 1-Band EQ for each sample -synth section using basic waveforms like sine, square, triangle and so on -LFO modulation of Filter, Pitch and Volume (sorry, no Pan modulation here) -Master-4-band EQ -Program LFO: modulation of all samples assigned to a program (that is, one parameter is modulated for all samples at the same speed) -Loop modes: forward, backward, one-shot (+reverse), loop+release, unfortunately no alternate ("ping-pong") loop -destructive loop crossfading -very cool feature: Duplicated samples refer to the same waveform data and thus don`t eat up memory, yet they can be modified in every regard, e.g. different waveform startpoint, different loopmode -ReCycle-like drumloop split function: ideal for breakbeats -very easy sampling procedure: auto start/stop (by threshold), auto-mapping to successive keys, automatic placing of new samples into a samplebank (great for drumkits/multisamples) -stereo resampling with filters and effects: -optional AIEB1 expansion adds 6 individual analog outs (usable as 6 mono outs or 3 stereo pairs) and SPDIF coax i/o + optical (toslink) i/o.

The overall sound quality of the A3000 is superb. If you sample and play stuff without change, you hear what have sampled, no more, no less. Once you start adding filters, modulations and effects, you get an extremely cool, aggressive and modern sound. This is what I especially love about the A3000: it sounds so electronical, I can make so many weird and sick sounds with it. I think this sampler is great for all sorts of electronic music: techno, trance, house, drum`n`bass, hiphop, industrial, ambient. It sounds so modern, just great. Using parameters like velocity to cutoff or velocity to Envelope or Random pan, you can both add distinctiveness and randomness to your music, making it more lively and less static.

This box is built very stable (all-metal casing) and I haven`t experienced any problems with it so far. I would deem this thing suitable for live use.

I called the German customer support several times before buying it, asking them some technical questions. They took the time and were quite friendly.

The Yamaha A3000 is a very powerful, versatile, great sounding and easy-to-use sampler that I would buy again if I had to. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to make electronic music, espacially weird/innovative stuff. Import of foreign sample data via CD-Rom is uncomfortable, so if you`re planning to read a lot from Akai/Emu sampling CDs, the A3000 might not be the thing for you. However, if you`re into making your own samples from movies, old records, software synths or borrowed equipment, this is THE sampler for you, as you can f**k up every sound to an impossible degree. It`s really unbelievable, but this box makes your music really unique if you take the time and mess things up.

The Yamaha A3000 is a 64 voice sampler with 128 MB max. RAM, internal effects, optional internally mountable SCSI disk, two stereo out and optional output expansion and S/PDIF.
Get the complete specs i.e. from the Yamaha web site.
My comments are based on the operating system version 2.0, after working with the A3000 for about half a year.
Whats cool about the A3000:
- sampling audio sources is very comfortable. The A3000 can automatically trigger record and stop based on an adjustable threshold level and map the samples to note keys (allways same, white, black + white). It can also normalize automatically. This way sampling off an audio sampling CD is fun, as well as taking a series of performances. Only triggering by MIDI note is missing.
- though it is said to be a matter of taste, I find the user interface very intuitive and fast to operate (i.e. compared to the ESI4000). When trying out the A3000 in the store, I could almost instantly play with effects and even resampling in a few minutes without the aid of the manual.
- The flexibility (not the transfer times) of the disk storage is great. Every kind of structure (sample, program, sample bank) can be loaded into RAM or saved to any volume on the disk.
- the three effect devices offer much of the stuff I need. Compression, distortion, amp simulation, kind of ring modulators, real time time stretch and pitch shift and of course the standard ones like reverb, delay, chorus and so on. There are lots of others, like vinyl simulation, lo-fi and something called 'noise delay' which is really cool and there's much EQ everywhere.
- The organization of programs, samples and sample banks turned out to be very flexible and intuitive. There have been critics that the A3000 can not switch 'instruments' for each channel using program select in multimode. For me this is not a problem. I create a separate program for each 'song' where the channel/instrument settings are saved and keep them throughout the song. The good thing about this is that the effect settings are stored with that program and thus are exactly reproduced when switching to that program. Thus, all the individual settings for a 'song' are stored in a single managable unit.
- The filters are good and effective. There are low/high/band-pass, mixed, dual 'peak' filters and others, a total of 16. Especially the 24db low-pass can turn the A3000 into a 303 because of the high resonance and filter overdrive.
- The pitch wheel can even reverse the sound (i.e. for scratching) if you like.
- There are several ways to process loops. The A3000 can split loops into a series of rhythmic slices, map them automatically onto adjactant keys or rearrange them randomly to a new sample following different algorithms. Some samples may even be reversed during this process. Cool for remixing, this seems to be what people are doing with ReCycle!, but the A3000 does it in stereo.
- Sounds can be easily fattend by subtle changes to pitch and phase of the stereo channels.
- the envelopes are fast and can be well adjusted.
What's not so cool about the A3000:
- the knobs are sluggish and sometimes go one tick further after releasing them. One can get a bit used to it, but this one is a minus.
- the disk transfer rates are quite slow
- it was disappointing to realize that while resampling the max. polyphony is limited to four and that MIDI controllers don't work. Resampling is however ok for recording single sounds with effects.

I think the A3000 makes the ESI4000, which I've got too, look old. The ESI wins only in the disk transfer times discipline and maybe when creating crossfade loops.
In fact, the A3000 has become my most important sound device, because it sounds good and is fun to work with. It also has been stable all the time, no crashes, no loss of data so far.
Also the service from Yamaha Germany was excellent. When my dealer failed to get me the manual addendum for the OS version 2.0, I called them and the next day I had a manual in my mai

Software version 2. The simplicity of this machine is superb. The matrix system means that all the commands you want are there in front of you for easy access. Pushing the first knob on any page calls up the sample menu, and that's really useful. Editing is simple, setting up sample banks is simple. Sure, you can get lost within some pages, but this shouldn't put you off - after all this machine >>is<< a power house and some operational quirks are to be expected. The manual is massive, but to be honest with you, I hardly ever touched it - the interface is >>that<< intuative.

64 Note poly, 16 part multi, up to 128Mb RAM, SCSI as standard, 4 outs, Loads of filters, three effects units, HD Support up to 8Gb (Partition size 1Gb), internal HD mounting supported - and these are just a few of the features. The effects are great and relativley easy to use. There are some you'll probrbly never use (e.g. Turntable) but the Auto Wah is wicked, and the reverbs are of top quality. Expansion capabilities (apart from RAM and HDD) are pretty good too. The AEB1 output expansion board adds 6 futher outs (taking to 10) and digital I/O. Costs 149 UK Pounds (comes/w V2 software if you don't have it on your machine). It's got a scratch pad sequencer, but it's not really worth mentioning. Sample rates are 44.1kHz to 5kHz Lo-fi and up to 48kHz with the digi I/O.

The AWM2 tone generation system still holds fast. Once your samples are in there, they sound identical to the source (at 44 / 48 kHz). They can also sound completley dirty and contorted using different sampling rates, filters and effects. The sounds will have that "Yamaha" edge to them, which makes them punchy (but may not be to every ones taste), and so this is a sampler well suited to the dance market. Responds to Velocity and Aftertouch pretty well.

Built like a tank, although is very big (about the size of your average video recorder) but is quite light (about 6.5Kg). This thing should last for ages, although watch the knobs at the front, they could well get damaged. Live work would be no problem with the A3000. Front knobs to have a specific rate at which they mush be turned to get maximum response (due to internal optical sensors), but its never been a problem for me.

I've never had a problem, so I've never needed to ask for support!

I'd buy it again, and again, and again. I've had it for a while now, and it really is the best piece of gear I've bought for ages. It's worth what I paid, and is probably worth even the RRP of 1299 UK Pounds (Street value = 900 to 1000 UK Pounds). The A3000 is central to my set up, and It really does enable me to get on with it and make my music. My only wish is for a better quality Time Stretch, but the A3000's time stretch is still one of the best I've come accross. Please do listen to it before you buy any sampler, it may change your mind!