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The 303 is a very nice piece of kit for a serious DJ or a starting out producer. For a dj it is way ahead of anything else on the market intended for dj use. It doubles up as a real time effects processor with some powerful effects. They are of generaly high quality although on their most extreem settings they do loose some quality. (however their most extreem settings are so extreem they're bloody stupid, so you don't need to worry about that!) For the live musician or DJ one of the most useful functions has to be that it automaticly quantizes the samples to an exernal MIDI timeclock via its midi in (which can also be used to trigger the samples)
However, if you are thinking of using the pattern sequencer, forget it. It is so clumsy and just feels cheep and nasty (this is no reflection on the units other functions however) Its not realy realtime though, because it sends a really nasty metronome sound out of its main out, so you can't sequence it in real time. All of this is made up for by the fact that the control system for triggering samples manualy is so good that only a social benafit fidling sloth man would be lazy enough to want to use the sequencer insted of using the pads to trigger samples. The way the 'one shot' or 'loop' modes are selected for each pad is also very well done. The reverse button is very quick and useful, as these things have a tendency to sound cheesy, but you can pull soome good tricks with it. If your using it for DJing, make sure you have a mixer with a send and return, it'll be so much more useful in a setup like this. When using it live it is easy to edit the effects and levels of non-live pads ready for fading up.
The sampling time is great, with an optional Smart Media card, you can sample in Mono for 202 seconds at 44.1 khz this will set you back about £60 but well worth it. When you downgrade your samples for sapce saving purposes the quality reduction is hardly noticable, i always sample in 'long' mode.
Basicly you can do anything you can do on something like an Akai S-950 apart from the loop remixing (which you can do on your pc with 'Bomb that Beat, most recommended)
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