Sweet! You’ve got an interesting sitar thing out of this one. It’s really cool to hear what people are doing with the effects on this thing.
I had turned my nose up at the Reverb effect, but I’m loving it on guitar with those settings. And you can push it even further by going through it twice by mistake .
I messed around with this a little bit more today: Ring Mod → Crusher → Super Filter → Reverb. I don’t know the Lossy pedal – and to be honest I don’t want to listen too closely or I might up and buy the thing – so I just tried to conjure the essence of my old dial-up modem. In a big tank.
Something that struck me as odd (especially in 2025) is that there is no ‘Shimmer Reverb’ on the MKII. Sadly I no longer have the MKII to try this myself, but I was going to try building one directly on the machine itself.
Since you have two busses on the MKII, and shimmer reverb is basically a cloned signal pitched an octave up and then fed through the reverb along side the original pitch, then perhaps you could use standard reverb on one bus, but use a pitch shifter before a second reverb on the other bus?
If I recall, you can adjust the way the effects busses are linked. So providing this would work the way I think it would, just set it to parallel and then arrange the effects as outlined above, and you should, with a bit of luck, have ‘Shimmer Reverb’ on the MKII and even have tons of control over it via the parameter settings of the reverb and pitch shifter effects.
Thanks, man. I loved your theme and that sample pack you compiled was filled with inspiring stuff. You’ve got a real ear for finding great material and the mission brief was incredible.
I appreciate you snapping me out of my recording slump. First thing I’ve done in forever. I’ve learned to love the combination of the 303 and 404mkii, but I bought a 404OG a while back after people were gushing about it being the best sounding SP, so I need to throw that in the mix.
I hadn’t considered the double reverbs. Nice happy accident! I’ll give that a try when I get a chance. I like the ambience one at minimum and maximum decay settings, so I’ll start there.
Yeah, I also thought really poorly of the reverbs but I think the key is to just learn to embrace the lo-fi digital shittiness of them, which I guess is what Lossy is about in spirit at least.
Also, I had totally missed the Ha-Dou reverb until @schoolbabyboy dropped that on here somewhere about turning mod all the way down to get a really spacious reverb.
after saying this i wanted to give it a shot. this is based off my minimal knowledge of what shimmer reverbs and Lossy sound like. i dont love the Cloud Delay, i feel like it always sounds the same to me. but its in there. got some casio guitar chords going through zan-zou, ha-dou, juno chorus and cloud delay
I had this thought yesterday. Roland appears to have maxed out the length of the looper, i wonder if they could figure out a way to double the length to four bars by somehow sacrificing audio fidelity. It would be awesome to have a lo-fi looper mode (and lo-fi skipback mode). The buffer time is probably a separate issue, but a man can dream (although the MicroKorg MKII’s looper is much longer in “lo-fi” mode, so maybe it would work).
computer + sp404mk2 makes me sad. defeats the point.
but computer + sp404mk2 can make me glad.
if anyone fancies giving this a go and trying to break it and find bugs i hadn’t thought about, i’d appreciate it.
i’m really excited about what this can open up for the mkII. with so many different use cases and workflows out there this attempts to cover all, from the “audio input FX processing destroyers” to the “ducking your whole pattern with the kick dry routed to main out crew”.
i’ve added a note triggered side chain that can be routed to up to 6 destinations including the morph which can batch process everything. even got a control ALL feature in honour of the Machinedrum.
I’m away from my SP, but does this give you the ability to assign/change parameters of the SP effects on the four Buses with the menus in your web app? If so, I’d be definitely down for trying this out for you! The MKII has basically also become my main audio interface these days, so it would be great to be able to quickly assign and experiment with all the various combinations of Bus effects when recording guitar or synths or stuff into Logic.
yes, it’s setup for instant access to all the bus parameters in one place with modulation and envelope triggering opportunities.
just noticed the midi clock sync to lfo is broken.
Oh, man. That is a game changer. One reason I haven’t fully explored all the effects combinations as much as I’ve wanted to is the time needed for moving over to Bus 3/4 and the “feature” everyone hates where it won’t stay on the effects menu without hitting remain. This will be great for exploring and experimenting.
I’m not a big shimmer fan myself, but that’s a great idea about running two reverbs in parallel.
Would also be worth exploring recording 100% reverb and delay sounds, reversing them, and layering that over your regular recorded part, even panning them in the mix. Lots I still need to try.
I’m reminded of this What Had Happened Was video, where he was talking about how long it took for the potential of the 404 OG to be recognized. I think we are still scratching the surface with the MKII. Now that the low-hanging fruit has been picked, it’s time to start exploring the outer reaches.
This is very cool. Thanks for sharing. I’m testing it out right now and I’m having issues getting the effects to turn off with the buttons on the top. Using Chrome on an M1 MBP. I can turn on the effects using those buttons, they just aren’t turning the effects off.
I also don’t see the Sidechain window component; where is that?
Going to explore this a bit more. Nice work @waftlord!
Hi, EN’s! A year ago I got my first SP-404 and after close communication with Elektrons, at first SP workflow was wildly irritating. And how many months did it take to practice shortcuts to automatism?! OMG! Now I’m ready to share my achievements, I also plan to release several sound packs and similar videos for them, fortunately enough materials have accumulated. I’ll be glad if this inspires you:
i’ve reverted to a stable version, some midi issues i need to sort for the sidechain and sync.
the top buttons turn off the midi out for each bus (so we can pause modulation), if you want to turn off an effect the QWERT keys to toggle bypass on each bus.
I had a play around for a little while. I didn’t try the side chain or LFOs, but didn’t have any crashes or anything in Chrome for the regular stuff. Worked really well.
A couple of points:
(1) It didn’t work in Safari for me, but this is probably expected. You might want to note the preferred browser at the top for new users.
(2) No idea if possible, but it would have sped things up a lot for me if the effects could be ordered alphabetically
(3) Some effects like the Amp sim had everything defaulting at zero, it might be better to have these at like halfway up or something otherwise it takes a while to set everything up.
One question:
How do presets work? I thought maybe I could hit export and save the settings to come back to next time, but it didn’t do what I expected.
Anyway, none of this is a complaint, just thought you might appreciate constructive criticism/user impressions.
I’ll definitely give it another go when I have time.
I don’t think it’s possible for a pad to go to both Bus 1 and 2 in parallel. But if you don’t need it to be a live effect, you could duplicate a pad and send one to Bus 1 and the other to Bus 2.
Nice! Sounds like an old arcade machine waiting for some coins.
I think it can do four bars, right? But if you want to double the length to eight bars, you could try halving the tempo. Probably easiest if you have a way to provide an external metronome or beat.
chrome/edge webmidi only.
currently manual order, interested in consensus on fx ordering.
you can turn pots to update params quickly. some fx have clear defaults, some parameters would be my arbitrary choice. was considering user configurable defaults but…
the presets store all current settings to a slot with a shift + click. recalled with a click. these could be seen as defaults containers for quick recall of your preferred values to work from. export import is for all 160 slots. But they should be stored locally between sessions anyway.
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on here somewhere about turning mod all the way down to get a really spacious reverb.
