Table of Contents
E-Mu ESI 4000
A 16-bit sampler with some nice features and filters. Like most old samplers the main drawback is getting sounds off and onto the thing.
The whole ESI series are pretty similar, so stuff in guides you find online is all pretty transferable.
Cool Things
- You can fade from one sample to another on the same note.
- You can assign any CC to any parameter(?). These guys used it to get a granular synthesis type thing going with a bit of one-off menu diving :O
Storage
It has a zip drive, but those disks are infamous for going bad (I had to use them when I studied animation/multimedia, and can confirm, though I do have a soft-spot for them anyway). It's common to replace the disk drive with a disk drive emulator, the popular one is Gotek.
I've been using regular floppies 
It also has a SCSI port which you can use to attach HDDs, CD drives etc. There are some SCSI SD card readers like ZuluSCSI and SCSI2SD that are a bit of a cheaper option than the Gotek. Zulu seems the best of these two, as it uses a standard FAT32/ExFAT file system so can be read on a computer.
Guides
- EMU ESI4000 Sampling Basics - Good video guide.
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See Also
- ESI Sampler Resources Page on neil's webbly world.