Don't misunderstand me: Ableton Live is an excellent piece of software, and it is great to work with. But a mouse doesn't replace the inmediacy of a keyboard. I've connected my synth to the VP-9000, and sampling instruments and loops is a lot of fun. It is simple. Very simple. I learnt to use it in less than a week.

I've had this thing for a couple of months, and today i was playing with some samples, and added some of the internal effects. I'm sorry, someone wrote in this forum that the effects were the same kind of effects that you would find in a home keyboard. He was wrong, very wrong. Today i added a guitar amp emulation, and i could choose from 14 different amp types. 12 different types of speakers. 10 different Mic settings. For a total of 18 different parameters... just for one effect !

The resulting loop, with effects and everything was pure DAFT PUNK. Gee, you can hear this machine on all the discovery album.

A lot of samplers have appeared in the last years. Akais, Emus, Yamahas. All of them great machines, but who could tell one from the other ? I'm not saying that they are useless, not at all. I'm just saying that they all do the same things. The VP-9000 might be short in polyphony, but what it lacks on voices, it adds in character. No sample that goes into the VP-9000 comes out unchanged. It really adds "something" to the sound that the others don't. It is nasty, digital, crunchy, but musical. It adds flavor, certainly, a lot of flavor. What other samplers can do, a computer can do a lot better. Better interface, more hard disk space, whatever. But a computer can't replace my VP-9000.

The VP-9000 is the only hardware sampler i've kept. Software samplers can replace every other machine out there, but i'm not letting the VP-9000 go.

Thanks to the bashers ! If they didn't had complained so much about the VP-9000, probably the price would still be high, and i wouldn't be able to get one second hand.

If you have less than US$ 400 today, you can get a VP-9000 easily. I bought mine planning on selling it in my country, but after using it, i'd never give it up. I foresee many years of use for this thing...

(oh, by the way, i had only one crash in all these months: install the new O.S. !!!)

Domt buy as your first or only sampler unless your unto tripped out music or you have the ability to dub tracks of audio with cubase sx etc . . it was never designed for multitimbral work , it was designed to timestretch and shift and warp in realtime and its really best described as a re-synthesis/sampler and masher . . .in the right hands this thing sounds sublime !