Forum for all other samplers & synths such as Maschine, MVs, Akai S & Z series, Roland, Korg, OP-1, analog synths etc.
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By NearTao Tue Jan 11, 2022 1:27 am
For anybody interested... been working on writing a guide book for a bit over a week. It's going to take some time to get everything filled out, but working towards creating a good source of information for folks to learn about the mk2 and what it can and cannot do.

I'll be keeping this URL up to date https://neartao.wordpress.com/neartaos-guide-to-the-sp404-mk2/
Byimpatient-member Tue Jan 11, 2022 1:47 am
NearTao wrote:For anybody interested... been working on writing a guide book for a bit over a week. It's going to take some time to get everything filled out, but working towards creating a good source of information for folks to learn about the mk2 and what it can and cannot do.

I'll be keeping this URL up to date https://neartao.wordpress.com/neartaos-guide-to-the-sp404-mk2/


Cool! You think anything would spill over and cover the older 404s? I have a 404sx and would love to read your information on it. I read your stuff on the 202 which was a good read man. If not, I'll still follow along with this new one you got going. It's good info regardless if it pertains to my specific kit.
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By NearTao Tue Jan 11, 2022 11:59 am
Currently I only have a 202, 303, and mk2. So I'm not sure how much would be applicable to the 404/sx/a. Maybe I'll consider picking them up at some point and writing up about them.

Hopefully for now at least some of the information is applicable :D
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By NearTao Wed Jan 12, 2022 1:18 am
I just posted 0.8...

This latest update is quite a bit more than I've done over the last few days, a lot of links added to the reference section... some day I'll get ahold of a service manual link to add in, or figure some things out and add some of that documentation, but for now just a lot of links mostly for videos people posted about the mk2, technical information, various forums. I'll probably end up pruning it down a bit, but figured I'd see what it started to take shape as.

I also took some time to check if the microphone or guitar input had any interesting overdrive or distortion characteristics. They don't, same old digital clipping as the line level inputs. I'll see what I might be able to do on the USB-C inputs, but I suspect that is likely to be just more digital clipping. So.... I continue to say that unless you want digital clipping, don't let your EXT SOURCE go red... you're much better off using a compressor if you want to increase the overall loudness of a sample.

There's a few other things, but it's been another day of bouncing around a lot as I tie of on another experiment, and a handful of things I wanted to research.
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By Ill-Green Sat Jan 15, 2022 11:29 pm
It's looking good. **Cough** I mean it's looking bad, for the antonym-bot. :lol:

Way better than 1.13. I sent Roland a lot of the issues Near Tao mentioned even though I won't be using half the sh!t he uses, but other users may need them. As for me simple updating via USB must be put in effect. Soon I assume.
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By NearTao Mon Jan 17, 2022 3:15 pm
Woof… this was some serious work to get the guide updated to 0.10. Update available at the usual link https://neartao.wordpress.com/neartaos-guide-to-the-sp404-mk2/

I got a bit obsessive over the last few days, and read just about every single post in the Elektronauts' SP-404 mk2 thread as well as the Gearspace SP-404 mk2 thread. This is well over 4000 posts to read through, and took me the better part of four or five days to complete. Lot's of good questions, and lots of good answers, but I'm not sure I am up for doing a repeat of that any time soon.

All of this reading has resulted in a lot of really good questions for the mk2 (around twelve pages worth), and I have as much as possible been adding in answers either from forum members or just doing my own research. I would have gotten this out last night, but I figured it was worth spending the time to better organize the questions.
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By 64hz Tue Jan 18, 2022 11:43 am
Ill-Green wrote:And v1.14 is here :P



Lol he calls Roland a niche company. :Sigh:
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By NearTao Thu Jan 20, 2022 1:25 am
I've added version 0.11 of the guide at https://neartao.wordpress.com/neartaos-guide-to-the-sp404-mk2/.

I've got some ideas for linking some working session videos with the guide, so stay tuned for that.

The last two days were mostly about trying to flesh out some of the existing sections some more. Primarily the audio input section, but that also drove me to adding a new section for audio output as well. I'm nearly done with these, and should be able to get into more detail for getting into sampling and adjusting samples soon.

Feedback from folks has been to keep up with how I am writing. I know my style is kind of loose, but I guess it is helping people understand what different sections do. I'll keep at it for now, unless I get specific feedback to try and go a different direction.
By Riley Predum Fri Feb 18, 2022 2:52 pm
@NearTao thanks for the amazing manual! I'll take a look :)

I wanted to add a note to see if you've encountered this and to get it added to the Roland Cloud App section which seems WIP: importing a project onto another project is DESTRUCTIVE, regardless of the number of pads in a project. I learned the hard way and lost all my songs last night. I wanted to simply move a couple banks from project 3 into the couple free banks on project 2 to consolidate. But lo and behold, my entire project 2 was replaced by project 3 (emptying all other banks). This is a huge design flaw it seems. I reached out to Roland but they hit me with a legal protection email saying they cannot accept any ideas from the community. I suppose the best option is to include a warning in a manual such as yours!

The way around this seems to be exporting to SD, organizing file names etc. on your computer, and then, on the SP, going to the project you want to populate and importing those from SD one at a time. The cloud app has been quite unremarkable thusfar in my workflow.

Cheers,
Riley
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By Lampdog Fri Feb 18, 2022 11:44 pm
Riley Predum wrote:This is a huge design flaw it seems.


No it’s not. 1 project per workspace, lots of gear works this way. MPC’s work that way. It’s just that you weren’t aware of how things are done. For that one thing, sounds like the machine was doing what it was designed to do.
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By NearTao Tue Mar 01, 2022 8:37 pm
DJ Mode and the related topics are more or less done now.

Get the 0.19 update to the guide at https://neartao.wordpress.com/2022/03/01/roland-sp-404-mk2-guide-v0-19/

My daughter has school vacation this week and I decided to take the time off to both spend with her and get some more time into working on the guide. This update was actually really good in that it got me more thinking about how to write up DJ Mode over the last few days, as well as really thinking about what I think is actually valuable for the guide in general.

At the moment, I think I am the most proud of the DJ Mode section, and think it will be something that I'll use as a template for standardizing and updating the other sections. I'm not going to go back to the other sections at this time, but I'd definitely be interested in feedback from all of you how the DJ Mode section strikes you versus the other sections. For me personally, I think it hits a better balance between how to use different features, organizing how all these things inter related, and adding as much guidance as I can to clearly explain what I would use it for.

I also suspect that the Introduction and Missing Features sections in the DJ Mode chapter will really help frame where I am coming from and how I see the device working on not work, and these are two sections that I think I'll consider adding into the other chapters as they make sense.