ABSTRACT
In the 1970s Dave Rossum and Scott Wedge set up E-mu Systems to make analogue synthesizers. Faced with financial problems at the beginning of the 1980s they decided to develop the Emulator, a keyboard instrument using the sampling technology that was of secondary importance to the Fairlight CMI designers. It is often referred to as ‘the first affordable digital sampler’. Yet the Emulator and other sampling technologies designed by E-mu, like the SP-12 and the SP-1200 drum machines, were unaffordable for many potential users. Hip-hop is the genre of popular music most closely associated with digital sampling in the 1980s. However, hip-hop producers continued to use analogue technologies like turntables and magnetic tape to reproduce and repeat pre-recorded sounds. Some of the questions driving this chapter are: What technologies and sampling instruments were being used in the production of hip-hop in the 1980s? Who was using them and how were they being used? This chapter explains how hip-hop became synonymous with the use and mis-use of sampling technologies and continue to focus on the contingencies that occur during the design of music technologies. It shows how instruments are not only used in ways unimagined by their designers but in ways that are perceived to conflict with their principles, values, and marketing strategies.
