When synthesizers first appeared (way back there in the previous Millennium) you had to reconfigure all the patch cords in order to get a new sound. Some of the more affluent (or insane) keyboardists would perform with several of the same modular synth so that one could be played while others were being patched with whichever hand was free at the moment. Eventually, memory was added to the keyboards so that you could save your "patches" and recall them at the touch of a button. They'd still be there even if you left your synth off for a whole year!

Later, samplers were introduced and they went through this same process of evolution. First they could only load one sample, then multiple samples, then multiple instruments. But the samples still disappeared after you turned off the power. By burning some samples onto ROM chips many companies began offering synths that featured a large number of permanent samples.

Then, near the very end of the Millennium, user's samples could be stored in Flash ROM on a handful of keyboards. This revolutionary step took synths /samplers to new levels of convenience. Imagine having all the samples that you need for your style of music safely stored in memory such that, immediately after powering up, you'd be ready for your gig with no loading time, no endless feeding of floppy disks, no waiting for hard drives to spin up, and no SCSI cables.

If you've read about our tour of E-MU you already know that their E4 Ultra and e6400 Ultra can save samples to internal Flash ROM and that these chips can also be set up to use in the single-rackspace Proteus 2000. The Alesis QS6.1, QS7.1 and QS8.1 keyboards can hold up to 16MB via 2 PCMCIA Cards. (Just so you know, PCMCIA stands for People Can't Remember Computer Industry Acronyms.) The Yamaha EX5 and EX7 can also save up to 16MB of user samples via user installable Flash ROM. Meanwhile, their new CS6x uses SmartMedia cards to save sample and program memory. These tiny SmartMedia cards are also used in some of the small, table-top samplers like Roland's SP-808, SP-202 and Zoom's SampleTrack ST-224.