Yup. It’s pretty great.
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Curious to hear your initial thoughts!
Any early impressions on pro’s/cons, things you love, things that are annoying you yet, whether or not this is likely a ‘keeper’?
would be interested to hear your thoughts, cheers
Welcome to the club. 
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Unfortunately, work has meant that I’ve only had about an hour with it. I’m hoping to get some serious time in this weekend. I’ll gladly report back!
My very first impressions with it: insanely quick, easy to pick up, and incredible sound quality, as many others have said. I put together the beginnings of a very solid (if generic sounding) track in a matter of minutes, using only the stock samples, and never once cracking the manual to find my way around.
It is not an Elektron. It is not a cerebral machine made for deep programming and infinite possibilities. It is accessible and quick and just deep enough to get things done. It is made for doing, not thinking.
I have other thoughts that I’ll share more about after spending some quality time with it.
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Can anybody recommend a midi controller for the sp-16? I’d mostly like some faders for the track levels.
Neuzeit drop is the best midi controller on the market right now
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I got the sp-16 from the shelf a few days ago. I’d forgotten how immediate and great sounding it was. Yes, the sequencer is pretty bareboned cf. Elektron (for example) but not every sequence I write has to be channeling
Aphex Twin.
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So the last few weeks I’ve been flitting between the sp-16, DT2, MPC one+. In terms of immediacy, fun factor and sound, the sp-16 wins hands down. Providing you feed it decent sounds (ie. do the deep sound design elsewhere) and don’t need to go crazy with the sample mangling, it wins easily for me. I’ve found that feeding the main riff out of one of the individual outs into a quality delay pedal and then feeding that back into a thru track, I have a very playable system. Yes there are some limitations, but the SP-16 just sucks you in to getting an interesting pattern down. Coupled with a midi controller to tweak a few settings, I just make a couple of patterns and then jam them into an arrangement.
Edit: I should add, I finally gave the reverb a try having ignored it after all the negative comments. Whilst it’s no good for big, epic, modern edm or ambient stuff, for just adding a little space and positional sense to a mix, it works just fine.
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This is exactly how I use the SP-16 and how I found my peace with integrating lots of synths, effects and other “groove boxes” like Force, DN, Bento or Maschine+. They all have their time and share as guests during sound design and creation but in the end they (nearly) all end up as samples in the SP-16. Which is then my main live machine as well and my kind of “dub deck” together with a Xone mixer and some pedals. For my dub techno/ambient sound this is just perfect.
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What mixer do you use?
A Xone DB4 as performance and live mixer and a Behringer Wing Rack as the main hub to mix all synths & effects. In the studio some busses from the Wing go into the DB4, live the SP-16 is directly connected to the DB4.
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Oh I didn’t even realize you could connect a midi controller to control the SP-16! Nice
What kinds of settings on the SP do you like to assign midi controls to?
That’s it right there! 
Track levels and FX parameters mainly.
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Thanks. Just as a bit of an aside - what delay unit are you liking these days?
I’m trying to decide on one but man, there are so many options! Erica synths Echolocator…Boss RE-202…the list goes on and on. It’s so hard to decide
I switch between the zen delay and the bugbrand PT delay.
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