Roland SP-404 Mk2 (Part 1)

I’m still a total noob with the 404, but I found these videos really helpful and interesting.

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Ive read somewhere that Roland first supply all the stores in Arkansas then the rest of the world. Hmmm strange :thinking:

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Maybe just quantize the first note of your loop? I just quantize the downbeat of the first kick and then play out the rest of the groove. That way you’ll get a nice tight loop. Also the sub step features in step recording add a lot to swing.

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Got mine today. It’s bigger than I thought. :hushed: Like it though as a first time user of the SP series. :sweat_smile:

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i just purchased a used black MPC 1000 with fat pads upgrade. this machine is way better than this cheesy 404, at least as a main sequencer :wink:

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I remember that somewhere earlier in the thread, someone wrote about routing pads to the headphone mix only, excluding them from being resampled, so that it’s possible to hear them and play along to them without their audio being recorded/resampled. Can someone refresh my memory on how to do this?

give it a little till you’re fed up with the out-of-date loading times of the MPC1000, then let’s talk again. But agreed, it’s sequencer is superior to the SP404’s “sequencer” - which isn’t really meant to be a sequencer at all.

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Ha! Yeah the size kind of threw me a bit too at first. And yeah ve not bought something so “plasticky” in a long time. But in an odd way, that’s both two reasons I have in the positive column. Ie. It’s cheap, chunky and kind of feels like you don’t have to be super careful in case you scratch the paint like with an Elektron.

I spent a very short time with a guitar plugged in to it. Still to get my head around gown best to record a loop but just thrashing out a chord or note with fx and then playing about with it and resamplijg was def scratching an itch.

Still have these doubts that it’ll remove all OP1F GAS vibes in the long run but the Mk2 has surpassed a few expectations in the week or so I’ve had it.

I think there is a bug with the fx when in “manual“ mode, can someone confirm or show me what I am doing wrong?

I have set the efx knob mode to „manual“ (system settings)

The instant fx (5 on front of the sampler) act as expected. The other mfx start with preset settings or the last used setting. in other words the other mfx do not work as expected in „manual“ mode.

Further more I would expect, that the third mfx page can be activated with mfx + djfx + isolator.

i can live with that, if the 1000 does not hang up while beat making, like my old 2000xl did it often, because of the lame floppy disk drive. i trashed the 2000XL around the year 2005 by hammering it with fist in anger haha. sold it in separate parts years after.

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I thought that only OT owners do that :joy:

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I think you’re looking for pad mutes? In the UTILITY menu (SHIFT+13) select SYSTEM and look under the GENERAL tab for PAD MUTE. You can set it to mute MASTER or MST+PHN. If you select only the master, then while a pad is muted, you’ll still hear its sample over your headphone port, but it won’t get recorded by a resample.

EDIT: Forgot to say you actually mute/unmute pads by holding SHIFT+REVERSE while tapping the pad(s) you want to mute/unmute.

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To get to the third fx page it’s just mfx+isolator, no djfx

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I believe you are looking for Cue. Have not used it my self but the manual can hook you up.

Edit:

From the manual, nothing about resampling though.

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Here’s the first something I made with the Sp404mk2. I recorded and performed the loops and the transitions into the op1f via usb to one stereo track. Then I used the Sp pitch shift and lo-fi to get that pseudo-menacing vocals and recorded them into 2 separate tracks on the op. Lastly I did the mixdown (with a bit of mother verb to open up the vocals) and that was it. I don’t rap, but I’m into rap and hip-hop music so I took some bars I wrote last year, got some inspiration from billy woods and earl and did my best. It’s a bit rough.

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Using the Mk2 with the OP1F was something I thought of while walking the dog this morning. They work together well?

They work alright together. The OP-1F doesn’t send audio back to the mk2, so you cannot do fun/interesting loops over USB, but you’ve got all your inputs/outputs as audio, so you can certainly do that and have a good time.

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Are you thinking of the Routing option when you have the Resample screen up? If this is set to Mix, you’ll hear and sample whatever’s on the pads (or a pattern) as well as the external input. If you set it to ExtIn you’ll still hear everything, but you’ll only sample the external input. So you can play an external synth along to a sample / sequence, and just capture the synth sound to a new pad.

As far as I’m aware you can’t exclude specific pads from resampling, but without a manual dive I could be wrong. I don’t think the cue method will solve this. as it doesn’t seem to apply during resampling. There might be a method that uses the bus options to achieve this, but I can’t see how right now.

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LOL, nothing highlights the 404’s need for a comprehensive routing UI like the large varieties of answers to this question! Right now routing on the 404 is 20 different work-arounds that address only one specific use case, each. It needs to be much, much simpler.

You can. Just pad mute them and they won’t be resampled. If you want to hear them while they’re muted, change the pad mute setting from MST+PHN to MASTER and plug in headphones.

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Older vid, so sorry if my voice is kind of low in the mix, but this shows how to do it… will probably do some future vids again with this technique.

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