Emu ESI-32

[kel]

My friend let me borrow this sampler, it's been collecting dust in his closet forever. Anybody ever used one?

Supposedly it offers "Virtually distortionless" pitch transposition over a 10-octave range. Are there even 10 octaves in the range of human hearing?

[ImOnlySleeping]

i have a different model the Emu ESI 2000, i was literally gonna post something in this section today. it has that true turntable pitch. My version can only do +-12 semitones though. It has some pretty nice filters.
I actually got mine for free and Ive been trying to incorporate into my production with my 202 and 404 but i haven't had much luck.
One thing tho is you can set samples to certain midi keys or pads and set the group to mono to have mute groups. It also has time compression (stretching)

Ive been really wanting to get more use out of this machine, but i cant seem to. maybe someone else can help us

[squ!L]

i started with the akai s2000 and used the esi for 2 songs i think. pretty similar machines. as ImOnlySleeping said it has good sounding filters and yeah the pitching is "perfect". chopping samples takes a while because you have to dial through numbers but i was fast with it after some years. it's a powerful machine. 32-voice polyphony! i was using it with cubasis on the atari because it has no built-in sequencer.

[lodger]

http://www.vintagesynth.com/emu/esi32.php

I've never used the sampler, but I do love E-mu's romplers. let us know how that goes!

[Headphones]

I bought one of these brand new for a good deal when Emu was kind of going on the rocks, and clearing their inventory. Unfortunately, they sold me one that didn't even work, so I never got to really find out how much of a joy/pain these are. Maybe it would have been more than I could have figured out at the time, but I just felt very mad I had to buy the one that wouldn't even turn on. I see them from time to time on eBay, but something in the back of my mind just feels I might get burned again, so I don't know if I'd ever buy one. Unless somebody could show me what it can do, and that it won't be a paperweight when I get it home..

[Ill Green]

I've only read about them from Keyboard magazine. They seem pretty nice. Got some weird chopping features like one called Munge, it chops up a sample in multiple places then rearranges them and resample it back together. It was random though and I remember the reviewer wrote that he had to do numerous trys before he got the desired result. In fact its got tons of weird shit. Good luck.

[fathom]

I can't speak on the esi-32, but the emu -e5000 ultra has a function called beat munger. I find it really works best with percussive loops (drums, hats, bongo/congo...ect.) I've found that one would need to have the loop your using in either a perfect one or two bars. Once you put it in the beat munger it reads it and applies slice similar to recycle. then you apply different swing settings, change bpm, take hits out. it really is in my opinion the most slept on feature in the unit. ( crap here i go giving secrets)