Roland SP-404MKII Sampler [In-Depth Demonstration]

hi there dustin from roland here at long and mcquaid and i'm very excited to show you the brand new sp404 mark ii [Music] [Music] the 404 mark ii is the first brand new 404 model in 12 years it's the latest in a lineage of classic samplers from roland and boss like the sp202 303 404 and 404 sx and more over the years the 404 has found a home with so many different types of musicians of course beat makers especially lo-fi hip-hop but also any types of electronic musicians needing to play back longer samples even live bands who need to play back certain parts of their record for a show or even full backing tracks also as a compact sampler the sp 404 mark ii can run off a battery so you can bring it anywhere to get creative on the fly we've been listening over the years to what users need and want in a brand new model and we're very happy to show you today some of the things that we've added let's jump right into it the first and most obvious new feature would be the oled screen now this allows us to take a look at our samples in great detail zooming in for editing also managing the entire settings of the 404 mark ii in a beautiful new menu system we now have 17 velocity sensitive rgb pads and there's 32 voices of polyphony internally so that means that you can play so many more samples at one time without any cutting off there's 16 gigabytes of internal storage now we still kept the sd card on the side so you can import and export samples and projects however reading those samples from the internal 16 gigabytes plus the new pads makes for incredibly low latency performance and creation in terms of connectivity we now have quarter inch stereo inputs and outputs on the back we have midi in and out using 3.5 millimeter type a midi jacks which is perfect for the new series of boss b midi cables we also have usbc which allows us to have audio back and forth from not only our computer but also smartphones and tablets without the need for any drivers we have the dc input on the back for power however the usb connector can also provide power or you can use double a batteries on the front we have two separate headphone jacks one quarter inch one 3.5 millimeter and we also have a mic and guitar input which is quarter inch and you can adjust the gain and switch which type of input you're using you can play back any style of samples that you like from the pads with many different settings we'll take a look at this includes one shots or longer samples [Music] and we can set these samples to loop if we'd like as well [Music] and then we can play underneath them or we can lock them using the hold button [Music] easy as that we've expanded the options for editing and manipulating samples that are on the pads as well let's take a look at a longer sample of a full track [Music] if we go ahead and press start and end we can easily edit the start and end point of the sample when we've done that we can truncate it we can also normalize it or add emphasis let's put that back we can adjust the pitch and the speed of the sample as well and now we've added bpm sync as well as regular pitch shifting and old school vinyl mode we're able to set our samples to loop to reverse and we can change the pad playback behavior by turning gate on and off one of the most important new features is the chop menu let's take a look when we open up the chop menu we can easily go in and add marks and chop the sample up manually or we've got a couple really cool new modes the first one would be real time chopping now let's take a look at that as soon as i press the first pad we're going to start hearing the sample play and i can just inject sample chops at any point manually [Music] so you can see i've put those sample chops in as it was playing and now i've got these already chopped on some pads [Music] [Music] and of course we can zoom in and do some fine editing after just to get our marks right where we want them auto chop mode on the other hand has different options that will chop the sample up automatically either based on transients different levels with a threshold or time divisions depending on the length of your sample one more great option that we've added for pads is the envelope menu so with the envelope menu we're able to add attack and release to our samples and as you can see on the screen this allows us to do some very interesting amplitude shapes which can make for kind of faux side chain sounds and also is a great way to make any samples that you've put onto the pads more playable in the right style for your track the effects section of the sp 404 sp 404 sx and other sp samplers is legendary we have maintained the look and the feel of the sp 404 effects section however we've added so many new features now let's take a look at those as you can see along the top we've got the three control knobs and below are six buttons to select our effects let's run a quick pattern and we'll take a better look at the pattern section in just a moment we've got the familiar djfx looper [Music] isolator [Music] [Applause] delay [Music] of course the filter and drive [Music] and we've added some brand new effects as well one of them on the very front panel is the resonator now the resonator is really great for making harmonic and melodic material for more percussive type sounds let's turn that resonator on and there are lots of settings underneath that we can change in terms of root note [Music] as well as what types of chords it's playing back even [Music] now the resonator is really great for resampling internally so if you've got a really cool sound that you've made from a drum kit like this [Music] you can easily resample that onto a single pad the mfx button on the bottom right has been greatly expanded if we take a look and hold it down we can see two full pages of effects many of them brand new to the sp 404 mark ii these include interesting new delay effects classic effects like stopper tape echo and legendary 303 vinyl simulator 404 vinyl simulator and brand new cassette simulator [Music] if we take a look we've got two menus to choose from to really start editing those effects the broken cassette player [Music] another great addition to the sp 404 mark ii in terms of the effects is our ability to change which effects are preset on any of the first five buttons so you don't have to use the filter and drive resonator etc you can add your own personal favorite effects under there that just enhances your workflow and your performance that much more now let's get into some actual sampling as mentioned the sp 404 mark ii has many different inputs to choose from but what i'd like to do right now is sample directly from my ipad using the usbc input now i'm using roland zenbeats and i've got a pretty cool loop going on here with some synth parts let's take a listen first making sure that our external source button is turned on for monitoring [Music] sounds good to me let's get ready to record we're going to go ahead and press the record button and simply choose whichever pad we want to record onto now i've got it set to weight mode which means it'll start recording as soon as there's audio on the input let's go [Music] recording now [Music] whenever i'm done i just press record again [Music] all right let's stop our ipad and take a look at what we have on our pad [Music] sounds just like it did on the input now let's take a look there's our sample we can zoom in see more specifics we could truncate normalize add emphasis like we've seen before this level sounds pretty good to me [Music] let's go ahead and chop that up really quick let's go to the chop menu and you know what i just want to have two different samples from this so here's what we're gonna do i'm just gonna press one [Music] and like before i'll add another manual chop i was a little bit off let's fix that [Music] there we go i've got these two chops [Music] perfect let's go to menu assign to pad and all we've got to do is choose the two pads we want to put this on one two all done here we go now we've chopped those samples up and they're on our pads ready to go [Music] there we go but what we want to do is we want to add these to different mute groups so let's go ahead and we can choose from 10 different mute groups and we're going to add these two pads to mute group a so all that means is that if we play them at the same time only one's going to play let's take a listen [Music] great now we're ready to start making a track from our samples the new sp 404 mark ii pattern sequencer maintains the same kind of live input workflow of the previous 404 but we've added a bunch of really cool new features first thing i'm going to do is go to pattern select and press record and let's choose somewhere where we want to put a brand new pattern let's choose number five so here when we're getting set up we've got our metronome going to help us with our timing we can set our bpm i'm going to leave that at 93. we can set the length of our pattern all the way up to 64 bars let's keep it simple at four bars and here we've got our variable quantization strength so what that means is that if we play in a little bit off the beat we can have that quantized radon or we can keep it exactly as it was played if we want more of a loose feel and what's really cool about the new pattern sequencer is you can change that quantization in real time while you're recording let's take a look first we just want to lay down that loop that we've created so we're pretty well ready to start recording i'm going to press record and just like the weight mode before as soon as i press a pad we're going to start recording our loop [Music] there we go so we've got our first loop done and remember that was on 100 quantization let's add some drums we can go to rehearsal mode so if you want to be able to play some samples without committing them we can do that let's add a snare [Music] okay back to rehearsal let's find some more parts [Music] oh i like that wood block let's add that only on the four of every second bar [Music] we're gonna keep finding new sounds okay let's find a bass sound [Music] based sound on pad one let's go for that right away [Music] a little bit loose on the base keep going i'm going to go ahead and turn the quantization to 50 we'll add some high hats in here [Music] a little bit of a looser feel [Music] let's grab a kick drum no quantization on the kick drum [Music] nice [Music] all right let's see what else we've got [Music] here we go [Music] and one more for some pizzazz [Music] all right now we've got that saved as a pattern [Music] let's have a play with some of the mfx let's take a look at the stopper stopper is great for quick transitions [Music] so there you have it live input a lot of fun really capturing the soul of how you're playing but you've got those quantization tools to help you keep things straight if you'd like we also have the ability to edit patterns which is very useful so on the pattern edit screen we can do things like change the length of our pattern the start point we can go ahead and chop it to make it shorter or duplicate it to make it longer and of course we can copy patterns to another pad and then remove parts add parts and start to create more of a song on that note we've also added pattern chain which is just really fun and really useful for live performance if we're in pattern select mode and we hold the hold button we can choose any of these pattern chains and what we're able to do is select any patterns from any bank to play in sequential order so it's kind of like almost creating a song structure or even a little set list if you're playing back longer patterns and longer tracks so i'm in pattern chain 13 now we've got 16 to choose from and i can just go ahead and say well let's play b1 first then we'll play c2 and then why don't we play i5 i'm going to press the subpad button which is how we play the pattern chain and let's take a listen and we'll note that also bpm changes will happen per pattern depending on how that pattern bank is set because you have a different bpm for every single pattern bank or globally that's up to you let's take a listen [Music] so we've got pattern v1 playing it's pretty slow switch to c2 in just a moment totally different bpm different pattern but very smooth transitions [Music] now onto i5 such a useful tool another significant update on the sp404 mark ii is that of bus effects now bus effects are kind of like using an analog mixing board where you can send certain tracks through one effect and other tracks through a different effect let's take a quick look at the efx settings menu and we can see here we've got bus one and bus two and we can set these up to be either parallel or in series let's leave them parallel so we can have two separate effects buses for different pads and we want to set up our pads to go through specific buses the way we do that is we can switch between bus one and bus two with the bus effects button here and let's turn off any effects we have right now let's go to bus two i'm gonna hold remain and i'm gonna add these two samples [Music] to bus two where everything else in our pattern is gonna go through bus one let's play that pattern and see what kind of effects we can have [Music] so if we go to bus one and we want to add the djfx looper we can hear that those samples we selected are not going through the looper so we can switch over to bus two and put a whole different effect how about the cassette simulator [Music] so now you can hear our drums are clean our base is clean but just those two samples are going through the cassette simulator switch back over to bus one filter out everything else but those two samples [Music] let's turn that cassette off [Music] and not only that if you noticed on the efx menu before we also have two other slots for effects here now we're able to put in bus three and four as master effects which is great because this will affect everything and i really like to use this for things like the 303 vinyl simulator let's take a listen to our pattern now we can go change our settings for each of the buses including three and four turn up that compressor a lot a little bit of wow and flutter [Music] we've instantly got that 303 vibe [Music] if you'd like to capture your pattern that you've created or a performance with samples and effects as audio you can do that via resampling on the sp 404 mark ii all we need is at least one empty pad for a new sample and we're going to select what we want to resample so i want to resample the pattern we just made [Music] and we're going to press the resample button select an empty pad and as soon as i press play on our pattern we're going to be sampling that as audio [Music] we'll let it play through just once okay and now if we take a look at the pad that we selected we're not playing back the pattern we're actually playing back audio of that pattern and this will include any performance that we do at the same time so that's a very powerful tool now with all of the mfx that we've added to the sp 404 mark ii you can just imagine the type of sound design and interesting samples you could create just internally by recycling things that you've already made affecting them putting them into patterns and on and on and on however there is one very cool new feature that i have to point out in the same realm as resampling and that's what we call skip back sampling so i'm just going to have a bit of a play just casually play around with some samples i'm just sitting around having some fun [Music] getting weird with it okay well that was cool i liked what just happened watch this i'm going to press mark and the performance that i just did was automatically recorded why is that it's because the sp404 mark ii always has a sort of tape recorder going in the background so anything that runs as audio through the output is captured up to 25 seconds in the past so now [Music] we can see what i was just doing playing around having fun that was all there including the effects and the performance that i did [Music] so just like recording a new sample i can go in here and i can edit it chop it up use it however i want another amazing new feature of the 404 mark ii as mentioned many artists choose to use the 404 to play back full tracks on individual pads this is a great way to almost dj with it because you can still use the effects and it's very portable carry it around with you just plug it in and you're good to go so on the sp404 mark ii we've added dj mode if we press these two buttons together we have two channels and essentially instead of loading up a cd or a vinyl you load up a pad into each channel very easy so we'll select a pad for channel one already done and we'll select a pad for channel two and these are both more kind of full tracks so i'm gonna go ahead and press play on channel one and you can see there's some silk screening on each of the pads which tell you what types of dj functions they're doing when you're in dj mode we've got play pause we've got the ability to queue so we can output one of the channels to our headphones to make sure everything sounding good before we bring it in we've got control 1 and control 2 acting as channel faders and we've even got bpm up and down quick bending kind of like touching a record and the ability to sync so i'm going to go ahead and press sync on channel 2 and you can see that the bpms have lined up now i'm going to go ahead and press play and i'll bring in the other beat [Music] great way to perform with the sp 404 mark ii customization of 404s has always been a huge part of the culture and with the 404 mark ii we've made that even easier there's four hex screws on the faceplate that are easily removable and you can pop that face plate off put stickers on decorate it however you'd like also we're providing you with the design file for the face plate as well so if you want to get a sticker made or an entire overlay it's that much easier you can download that on our website also as mentioned before you can customize the startup images of the sp404 mark ii as well as the screen saver to help you manage and organize your samples patterns and projects we have the sp 404 mark ii app this app can run on windows or mac and it can be downloaded completely free from roland cloud while in the app we can drag and drop samples from our computer directly onto pads and this is affecting the hardware in real time because we're connected via usb so any changes we make are changing the internal settings of the sp404 mark ii hardware right away we can get in and change settings for our samples our patterns and more as you can see the sp-404 mark ii is a huge step forward in the evolution of the sp series offering a familiar interactive workflow but so many new and exciting features to take it to the next level [Music] huh [Applause] [Music] to learn more click the link in the description and head over to longamcque.com and if you've enjoyed this video be sure to hit like and subscribe thanks for joining us today [Music]

Channel: Long & McQuade Musical Instruments

Views: 38,324

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Id: PtD_Bck6dag

Length: 29min 17sec (1757 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021