Fantastic, good to know.
If you are on DC power, the mk2 does not appear to drain the batteries.
If you are on USB power, the mk2 does (slowly) drain the batteries.
If you want to make sure that you have fresh batteries, best to take them out if you are planning on using USB power. Or… it’s probably safe to assume that the mk2 puts a smaller load on the USB device (such as an tablet or laptop), so if you want to go powerless… stuff to consider.
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Cheers for the response, good to know the difference…
Can anyone tell me if the FX on the SP-404 mkii are generally the same as on Roland’s workstations? I’m trying to get an idea about them and I had a Roland Juno-G a decade ago. I would imagine so, although there appears to be some new ones. I know there’s videos of people going through the fx, but I would be using the 404 for industrial/noise/drone type stuff and nearly all videos are hip hop so it’s not easy to picture how useful they’d be. I wasn’t too impressed with the distortion fx on the Juno-G back in the day so I’m wondering if it’s generally the same on this.
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I think there are more delays than the TR8S, and in my opinion, the FX tend to be warmer.
But for the most part, yes, it is similar across devices, especially since the recent updates, where they tried to get them more in line.
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Gotcha. Good to know, although warmer is an improvement from what I remember of the Juno-G. It was far from warm. Thanks for chiming in!
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I will say, it is wonderful, the effects, and its varied delays would be great to sculpt you sound, especially with parameter changes in real time, and the different bus routings on the 404.
My one critiicism, is while the saturation is great, for some reason the distortion does distort, but for example, on my Prophet 6, the distortion sounds way fatter, where the 404 is more like fuzzy clipping or something like that. Still great, just not as beefy.
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The reverb isn’t that great, IMO. I hope they add another one. The tape delay is pretty good, and the various overdrive sounds are actually pretty nice.
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I agree, especially compared to valhalla.
And the overdrive is great too, which I guess paired with distortion would probably get the fattness I like…
But again, none of them are bad by any means… just there are some that are fantastic and some that are too vanilla
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Maybe some pre and/or post-eq would help with that, or placing a warm saturator instance after the distortion. Just thinking that distortion pedals on guitar can often sound thin if it’s going into a clean gain stage.
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You are probably right. I have the P6 and the Analog Heat, which both have alot of color to them. Thats what gives them their signature sound.
Having a clean distortion would give you the ultimate control if you really wanted to dial in your specific sound. And I feel that the 404 is all about control. I still feel that it is warmer than the TR8S, but distortion can get wild real quick, and maybe they went with a conservative approach with distortion.
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Afaik prophet 6 has an analog distortion
Agreed. Though also this is pretty on-brand for Roland. They’ve had a number of serviceable reverbs over the years, but never a great one (IMHO). Delay+chorus for whatever reason, seems more in-line with the Roland philosophy.
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That’s too bad about the reverb. “Serviceable” is definitely the word to describe them. I’ve never found them bad, like the one in the new Electribes I found awful.
For the type of music I do it often involves pitching samples way way down to do drones but often they end up muddy. If looks like some of the fx might be useful for carving out the mud.
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Yeah, it’s so easy to muddy up the low end on the 404. The second page of the “FILTER+DRIVE” FX has a smooth sounding “LOW GAIN” that can be knocked down to -24dB, and adjusted to between 20Hz–16kHz with the “LOW FREQ” setting. I end up using this a lot to keep my lows in check.
And, thankfully, because there are multiple FX busses on the mkII, it’s easy to chain this with other FX “live” instead of having to resample the low cut and then play it through the desired FX.
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Second page?
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Some FX parameters have little “down arrows” under them indicating there are “sub-parameters” that can be accessed by pressing the value knob.
See “Using the Effects” in the manual.
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I appreciate you @jemmons
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Question - say you have a loop or phrase that is even just a little bit different to the BPM of the track you’re working on. Is there a way to timestretch a sample (preserving pitch) to be exactly four or eight beats or a bar or whatever? It seems like the timestretch algorithm quality is there, but there’s no easy way to make that kind of precise adjustment. If there was a way to stretch to a certain number of beats at XBPM, or to an exact number of samples, that would be ideal. Maybe I’m missing something basic. How are people dealing with this?