My father and my Roland S-50 sampler.
Posted November 27th, 2007 by Oliver CheslerFiled Under: sounds, synthesizer
My father bought me my first keyboard, a Roland S-50 sampler. I remember he took me to Sam Ash in Teaneck, New Jersey. He worked nearby as a College Professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University. It was 1986 and I was lost in Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration album. I was 16 years old. Today, my father is now the president at FDU and that Sam Ash store is long gone.
The Roland S-50 was a futuristic looking black metal monolith with a fluorescent screen. It felt long and had 61 keys. Compare that with the measly cheap feeling two octave Oxygen 8 I use now! You could hook it up to an external monitor. I had mine hooked up to a 13″ green CRT poised on a three tier Ultimate Keyboard Rack. It also came with a digitizing tablet and pen similar to a Wacom tablet. This allowed you to draw waveforms but it was more gimmick than useful.
It was 4 part multitimbral and 16 voice polyphonic. It had a 3.5″ disc drive and 750k internal memory. You could sample at 12-bit at 15-30kHz. I remember actually using the different variable rates to save memory. You could even get some weird cool effects by sampling at the lower rate. Looking back I realize the discs of sounds that came with it were very good. Mostly they were rip off’s of Fairlight sounds. You had choirs, big 80’s drum kits and awesome nature sounds. I used to sit for hours playing with the rain and thunder sounds.
I would sequence it using an Atari 520ST and Cubase. All the multitimbral parts, voices and sample memory were always used. Back then we all dreamed of a day when we would have unlimited sample time (yay today!). However, using a machine to it’s fullest capacity for several years has a certain gratification to it.
The S-50 together with an extern CRT-screen and digitizer tablet - besides from looking real awesome - allowed a lot of cool things to be achieved. The S-50 is a breeze to use, and the sampling quality is nice and free from distortion, even if the bandwidth is somewhat crippled (due to the 30KHz sampling frequency). - sonicstate.com
Next time your staring at your 24″ Cinema Display, pirated copies of Kontakt or Halion and 30GB of sounds think of my father on a teacher’s salary spending over $2500 to give his son 28 seconds of sampling time. Now tell me you can’t make music with the technology you have. I dare you.
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November 27th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
agreed… my grandparents took their savings for me (which was suppose to buy a cheap car) and bought me a roland d5 and a mc500 sequencer that was rescued from a studio fire - the sequencer was he browned and had melted keys
that was the first mischief night i never went out and from that day on - i was hooked 
November 27th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Yep. The most productive I ever was dealt equipment such as a TR-808 and a Jupiter-6, and a really cheap Roland step sequencer I forgot the name of, back in 1985. –Kent
November 27th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Nice post. My first synth was the Oberheim Matrix-6, in 1986, and from my father as well.
I still have it. It’s where my alias and the name of my site came from.
November 28th, 2007 at 8:33 am
My first was a Yamaha PSS 130…great to see supportive parents, some kids gotta do shit like join the military for bonuses to get money for gear!
January 19th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
AHHH..the memories!!! I had the same system…1040ST…..
also..remember the ‘telephone song’ demo song? A pal of mine, Amin Bhatia (The Interstellar Suite and others) did all the demos and such for that unit
January 21st, 2008 at 4:19 pm
My first sampler was a roland s-330.
It sits on top of my second sampler an akai s900 and in between is my
yamaha tx16w. combined they were about 300 bucks.
they are glorious boxes!
March 2nd, 2008 at 9:01 pm
My first keyboard was a Casio MT something, it has a midi port, that was back in 1986 I think. I had an Atari 512 ST and the software was… I do not remember but the second one was master tracks! then I got a Yamaha keyboard, then a Kawai K1. My father was a fireman but as well he pleased me with everything. I loved the Kawai because it has a joystick. Then my first sampler was an Ensoniq ASR-10. A music teacher had the Roland S50 and it came with some depeche mode sounds!!! I wanted to buy an Emax 2 sampler but some one bought it first and I got the Ensoniq that ended up being so much beter. I am about to buy all those keyboards again. It was so painfull for my father to buy them, I have no clue how he did now that I am 33, and I never ended up being a musician, I am editing video. God bless him.
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:18 am