(obv depending on the user but) it really is. 404 is easily not the deepest device. what it can do is very apparent. terrible roland menu diving and key combos don’t make it deep, just impractical.
it’s a different canvas that forces you to have a different approach, i give credit to that. i owned one for about a year, and it felt just… tedious. sold it to get a syntakt, which made sense during that time. but now i sold my syntakt to get an M8 lol
It was more than enough time to realise that a sampler without a filter and fully tweakable envelope per track and an awkward sequencer and FX routing/control was not going to replace my DT
3 weeks is enough to know what to expect.
But not long enough to get used to it.
But enough to see that the grass can be greener.
What if Behringer made a SP-404 type device?
shut up and take my 90 dollars including tax
I heard new episodes of futuramma coming soon!
SP series makes sense to me as a playback machine with some onboard FX for performing beats you wrote elsewhere. but i think people sometimes forget that Dilla wrote Donuts by resampling the 303 because he had no alternative.
I think that ideally what I’d like to see is something between an SP and an old rack sampler. Something that lets me sample directly to pads so that I can have a pretty easy and tactile way of organizing, chopping, and triggering my samples. But also something that lets me add envelopes and modulate parameters with LFOs and play individual samples or groups of samples polyphonically. I’d also like to have tracks that can share envelope settings and fx routing like the Digitakt.
If Elektron wanted to make something like that I think it would be really cool. I really appreciate the way that Elektron lays out their menus. They let you go pretty deep in a pretty natural and painless way. After owning both Models, I’m not confident in them making nice pads though. So maybe they should just stick with the clicky buttons. I like those.
You know, it only takes a battery and cable to make that a reality…
I’m thinking something like a truly portable sampler/looper, with Elektron sequencing, a suite of digital effects, and actually useable pads. Octatrack style recording buffer implementation.
Who knows, maybe instead of pads it could have mini keys? Better yet, a touchscreen? 
and the price is
The book says Dilla made Donuts in Protools.
That’s also what it sounds like, IMHO.
Well, that’s because it isn’t a Digitakt replacement. As mentioned in another thread, and explained very well by @jemmons, the SP is phrase sampler with an effects engine designed for live performance and recording. It’s not a synth - style sampler. It’s not and never was a Digitakt replacement.
Gonna agree to disagree on that.
Pretty sure most of the people who dismissed the SP after 3 weeks didn’t even explore the amazing DJ mode.
I don’t know what people mean by deep, but it seems pretty deep to me.
That’s probably what they will eventually do and charge $800.
myth busted - but i think it actually underlines the point that they are not real composition tools
Myth busted, but to say they are not real composition tools is a stretch.
i guess im just echoing what @Stlaub was saying above - the feature set is not really geared toward generating original material but is more dj-oriented, which to me makes them handy as performance playback tools but a nightmare in the studio.
Myth busted … but it doesn’t matter because there since have been people who composed on an SP.