Akai X7000 Keyboard Sampler

This was the first sampling keyboard that I owned, and what a blast it was! I must have sampled everything within ten miles of my house and all my friends and relatives too!

If you can find this vintage piece (street price around $300 – $400) I know you’ll have a lot of fun as well. There are a few things to watch out for though.

It uses an outdated 2.8″ format disk drive that records to Quick Disks. If the drive is broken or wears out it could be very hard to find a replacement. As for finding blank disks, a quick search on Google didn’t turn up much. There were some hardware word processors that used this same disk format so that might give you some leads.

Also, the keyboard itself wasn’t very heavy duty. I’m a hard player and I had to replace the entire keyboard assembly every sixteen months or so.

However, you have to keep in mind that I was gigging and rehearsing five to seven nights per week, so it saw a lot of use and abuse. In your studio environment that probably wouldn’t even be an issue.

Other hardware samplers you might like to look at would be the Ensoniq Mirage and EPS, the Emu Emax and the Roland S10.