Roland SP-404 mkII

It'll be here sooner than you think

For anyone interested, Thomann and Dv247 are selling SP-404 Mk2 for 379! Only downside is you'll have a wait as they're out of stock still.

It's coming Monday!! Whoop whoop!!

sl23 wrote:It's coming Monday!! Whoop whoop!!

Please let us know how you like it. I’ve been on the fence for far too long.

OK sure. Two days to go!
I know what you mean, I was same. But I've never liked pattern sequences and the MPC is basically just that. I thought it was linear, which I suppose it can be, but it doesn't have loop within a sequence, which is what I really wanted.

I made some good loops, well, I think they're good, maybe not as good as you guys, and it is an amazing machine. But I don't like it's Workflow wrt full song construction. Which is a shame as I genuinely like it. I personally find copy paste a bit cumbersome, but that's just my opinion.

I seem to be having issues making samples.its greyed out for some reason. I just dislike how you get stuff off the MPC and into your daw. But that's the same with virtually all hardware. But the SP-404, to me, seems like an easy way to record loops and then I'm hoping to drag and drop to pc for use in my daw. Well, that's my plan.

I also want to record some beat box and other vocals to mangle and hopefully replace my RC-505. We'll see...

sl23 wrote:I thought it was linear, which I suppose it can be, but it doesn't have loop within a sequence, which is what I really wanted.

The MPC can loop within a sequence using start & end markers. Have you tried that?

No. I posted a question on the forum and lampdog said it can't be done.

Are you talking about loop markers within a sample? I need the same thing but for a sequence. As I stated in my previous post about it, I need to loop a section of a sequence. For example, if a sequence is 64 bars long, I would maybe want to loop bars 33 to 40 so I can work on that section. Seems hardware is following Ableton, but I don't like Ableton. It seems many fantom owners prefer linear sequencing too.

Yeah, thanks lampdog. I was just trying to explain better. I'll take a look when I get a chance.

Hey, I just tried those q-links and that's exactly what I was looking for! When you first mentioned them I thought they were only for moving the playhead. What a dope! Lol

I don't get much time to play with this stuff so missed what I've been looking for! Shit... Dunno whether to keep this now?!

Thanks for pointing that out

inflict3 wrote:Please let us know how you like it. I’ve been on the fence for far too long.

Well, on unpacking, my first thought was how light and plasticky toy like it feels! Start up was quick. Figuring out many basics was easy. Not recorded anything yet, hopefully try that tonight.
Fx are good everything seems right at your fingertips with very little menu diving.

I highly recommend taking a look at the manuals. Quick start, just to get acquainted. Then the reference manual and the shortcuts manual are very helpful I found personally.

One thing I will say, pads aren't great when finger drumming! I found that velocity couldn't keep up with what I was doing. So even though I tapped out drum and snare hitting pads hard for full velocity, I found the drum often couldn't be heard. Anyone else have that experience?

I won't be using it for that anyway so that's not a big loss for me. Out of all the hardware I've had, nothing beats the MPC pads! They have that reputation for a reason!!!

MC-707
MC-909
All electribes
SP-808
Beatstep pro
SP-505
And now SP-404.

The next best pads were on the newer Electribes imo.

Didn't get round to recording, but managed to find time to get loads of samples onto SD card. Although, for some unknown reason, the older wav files I have wouldn't work, giving an Unsupported File message. I just converted them to mp3 for now and that worked.

Also found more settings, pads this time, and looked in the manual. Everything is pretty simple on this thing. The issue I mentioned in last post about drum pad not triggering could be due to a low pad setting, think it was gain? Will try this later.

I've yet to try two important things for me and that's recording vocals and audio from other hardware. Will report back!

Vocal recording was very quick and easy, even editing is just so fast. It's simply a matter of honing the set up and learning the controls. Once you know how to use it, it's brilliant. Think I will be saying goodbye to the live 2, shame really!