so i was messing around on google trends ( http://www.google.com/trends/ ) and did some searches. this is what i got. where do you see yourself with music equipment in 5 years? it's very interesting to see how samplers have gone down so much.

The 404 was going off for awhile there

Isn't a bit weird to compare a brand to samplers? I would have expected a bigger rise for the Maschine especially with the new MK2 series just released. Not sure this would really show in a trend, but it's probably one clue of the direction samplers will be going.

what you can't see within the picture is that i actually put "native instrument maschine" and not just the brand. it doesn't shrink the text so you can see that i did add maschine in as well. i had to put the full title because the word "maschine" would kill the rest of the searches but not because of the beat machine.

What about Reason, Maschine and MPC Ren?

Interesting. However, I think it's just a trend in hardware period. Every DAW has some sort of sampling ability that post people take advantage of, even if it's just recording an audio track. It's technically still sampling since you can slice and edit that audio.

Computers are just the main thing these days. It's sad to see hardware die it's slow death. Just look at Akai. Their last big products have all been controllers for PC/Mac programs. :\ They came out with that little sampler brick thing, but that's really it (and doesn't really look that great, to be frank).

And Korg hasn't released a decent sampler since the ESX. They're moving into analog synth territory pretty hardcore these days. Roland on the other hand seems to just rehash and keep making the 404 to death.

I hope in the future something that's good cross between ESX and SP's gets released, something with the instant access to sample tweaking the ESX has but with the destructive editing and raw sampling power of the SP's. I know the 606 is a bit like this, but Korg knows live performance better than Roland from what I've seen. Roland designs their gear around simple raw power whereas Korg skims the power in place of ease of use and performance options and just being fun to pick up and mess with. Akai isn't in the race anymore, maybe Elektron, I suppose. If they make another Machine Drum...but it's so expensive, it's out of many people's reach.