They are all my children. 

My first sampler is a Boss SP202 DR Sampler. I bought this sampler with money I earned working at Universal Studios when I was 15, in the Flintstones store, folding clothes and just standing there while the B52s soundtrack for the Flintstones Movie played every hour on a continuous loop. The 202 is a limited sampler with no onboard sequencer, but has a handy BPM counter and excellent filters and lofi sampling. I sold it in in my twenties for weed money, and then missed it for a long time, and purchased it again recently for the same price I bought it for when I was 15. The loop is continuous. 

My second sampler is an Akai MPC 2000, which I also bought with proceeds from the Flintstones store, after I was unimpressed by my first child and its inability to sequence. The MPC 2000 was truly my preferred child, and I gave it ram and effects cards and never turned it off and I burned out the screen. But the OEM screen made it glitch, so I stripped it of its ram and effects cards and gave the carcass to my friend Circus and got an MPC 2000xl decades later, which is not the same, and I don't truly love it. 

My third sampler is an Ensoniq EPS. It is thick and chunky and lofi, and it looks like a Nintendo, and it gets very hot and crashes all the time. I got it from craigslist for $100 because I heard the ASR had a great sound and built in effects, but the EPS, being the precursor, does not have built in effects, though it does have a great sound. It is a keyboard sampler with a clock radio display. It saves files to single density floppy disk, which are different from double density floppies.

My fourth sampler is an Akai MPC 4000, which I got when the display on my MPC 2000 stopped working, thinking the MPC 4000 was more or less the same as the 2000, but with more capacity. They made a lot of changes. They introduced something called "parts," and "multis," and it is still unclear to me what these do or how they fit, and this is not good, because parts and multis are essential to the architecture. It is bright midnight blue, a nauseating color. The hard drive is partially fragged. The machine makes a sound like wind from the hard drive spinning. I have a refurbished hard drive, but to install it I would first need to offload all my saved files through a software called Aksys, which only works on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. So, she makes a sound like wind and confuses me and I can not erase her or let her go.  

My fifth sampler is an Ensoniq EPS 16+. This I bought also for $100 from a man on craigslist, who was very sketchy and would not let me in his house to test it, but rigged up something complex through his car speakers and power jack to show that it worked. He had also rigged up some sort of hanging display system for it with an entire roll of packing tape, which I spent hours removing with goo off. The man gave me a ton of floppy disks which all had a distinct smell. As did the unit. Parts of the Eps 16+ were rubbed away to nothing. The midi out had been clawed at. When I opened it up a year later, it was filled with fossilized insects of a type I'd never seen before. Nevertheless, the effects are incredible. As is the sampler. It always works. It is my most favorite child. 

My sixth sampler is an Ensoniq ASR 10. It is the big brother to the EPS 16+. On paper, it is the best sampler of all time. I bought it for $150 from an event rental service. They thought it was the past. And I got it cheap because one of the characters on the clock radio display is burnt out. So, sometimes I''m not sure how much I'm changing  parameter 4 in the envelope. I don't mind. It came with a built in SCSI adapter, which means I can save to a SCSI2D modern device that uses mini SD cards that I have to remove with a pair of tweezers. The ASR gets extremely hot with use, so I had to rig up a silent computer fan to cool it off. But the fan is not silent, so whenever I use the ASR I hear the fan, and my studio is not quiet enough. 

My seventh sampler is an Ensoniq Mirage keyboard, the first mass market sampler for the people. It uses a chip from the atari. It has an analog resonant filter. It is 8 bits. It sounds amazing. It is slow and rickety and difficult to program. It only has a two character display...in hexadecimal system. So to program it I have printed out a cheat sheet which is taped to its face with all the commands, and have to relearn the hexadecimal system anew. Using this one makes me nervous, because every time I turn it on it clicks and spools, and makes grinding noises which I know are normal, but I fear that will be the last time it sings. 

My eighth sampler is a Akai MPC Live 2. It is sleek and black and glows in the dark, and battery operated, and has a built in speaker---and it is loaded with gigabytes of stock preset trap sounds that I cannot erase or risk ruining the file architecture. It is an Ipad with some buttons and pan pots, and is designed to be a conduit to a lucrative plugin eco system. I sold a modular synth to purchase this, because I don't really believe in modular synths, and believed this modern MPC would be the answer and brain to all my obsolete gear, and that it would also be very easy to sample with because of the touch screen. But the sampling engine is not even as good as the MPC 2000, let alone the ASR 10, and though it's ok, it mostly sits unused, an over-engineered answer to problems it creates. 

My ninth sampler is a Zoom SampleTrak ST-224. It has been hyped for years as a poor man's SP1200. And I, being very poor despite my many samplers, believed the hype. And so should you. It is small and difficult to use, and the pads aren't responsive, and you can't put envelopes on the sounds so they don't fade out, but it has a lovely and terrible sound and profoundly random limitations and a nonintuitive architecture that makes no sense...and that's why it's now one of my favorite children. It saves to a Smart Media card and I don't know what that is, but I dutifully save all my intricate compositions to this Smart Media card, trusting it with my life. 

My tenth sampler is a Morphagene with five or so support modules. Like all of you, I thought modular had pixie dust, but I, being very poor, could never afford to get started. My friend Nic more or less gave me his old Nifty case, and I got the magical morphagene and some filters and modules from mutable that apparently do something, though I'm not sure what. I wanted a sampler with everything available on the front panel and modular magic. $1600 later, my morphagene system scans through some loops and every now and then randomly adds a harmonic fifth, and the rest of my system turns the sound in a smeary cloud, and that seems to be what I can get out of it.  

My eleventh sampler is my Serato system and a string of looper pedals---a Zvex lofi Looper, a Montreal Assembly Count to 5, and a TC electronic Ditto X2. They feed into and out of each other and I can do a lot with these pedals while never having to menu dive. There is almost neverending menu diving on the Serato which is weird because it's supposed to be a performance tool. One thing club DJs love doing is squinting at 8 point font in a loud, dimly lit club while drunk maniacs go wiki wiki wiki...

I will be hearing how these children of mine sing today, together, alone, bickering or in harmony, looping the cosmos.       

Live vinyl and cassette blends to melt the exoskeleton and tap the wellspring of the infinite I AM presence. Deep dives into beats / raps / funks / souls / jazzes / psychedelica / synth moves / new age / experimental / electro jams, plus in-studio performances, interviews, and other sonic investigations & spontaneous transmissions broadcast deep from the quasar mindpiece of dj theo3 and his top knowledge on the phonograph. Set your entire empire on fire. Leave your problems behind and bump. Reach out to infinite_contact@aol.com to get put on/down.

Entrepreneur and carnosaur, DJ theo2 was dubbed the “Prince of Records” in ’76 by Disco King Mario (RIP) and helped invent the “deadly live wire” scratch technique. During the 80s, after traveling the world for sounds and gaining fame throughout, dealt with inner demons. Now, after an age out of sight & out of Mind, theo3 has respawned to reclaim his throne, in Full Force & stronger than Ever! With over 2.6 million records, theo3 is still the “Prince of Records!”