S2400 Initial Thoughts // Damn It Sounds Good.. With A Catch

this video is sponsored by squarespace this is the isla instruments s2400 and yes i bought this with my own money and i pre-ordered this a while ago honestly i i kind of held off on pre-ordering this thing for a while mainly based off of the quality and my experience with the chord bought isla instruments first midi controller chord creator device super cool really useful and helpful and awesome with its features and idea but it had such a terrible feel to it and some unfinished features that were just sort of started and never finished and just left on the user interface which left me feeling a little sketchy made me worry with all the features that i was seeing that they wanted to add to this thing that it would suffer a similar fate basically bad quality and too many ideas for its own good well tldr after talking with a friend of mine he mentioned that the owner violet instruments said that they learned a lot from that product so i hope for the best expected nothing and pre-ordered the s2400 and it's finally here so you're probably wondering uh how is it it's amazing and confusing and weird and annoying all at the same times it definitely beat my hopes and confused others and whatnot so yeah let's check it out [Music] before i get into my pros and cons list about this thing i just wanted to make a quick beat to kind of go through some of the workflow on this so i have some samples loaded up here that i have used either from the internal sounds as well as recorded some which is actually one of the strong suits about this thing is that it's super straightforward to sample and assign and sequence within seconds so let's go ahead and do that right now so we got a kick here all right let me go to my level cool i'm going to go to multi-mode level so this gives us eight different levels based on wherever these faders are so for example you know that was max and they all kind of go like this you got really really high to really quiet and the pads are velocity sensitive but by default they're not so i kind of left it in that mode to kind of use it in that old school way so let's go ahead and record a cake pattern cool we'll go to our next sound which is a okay so this clap is way too loud i'm gonna go to the envelopes turn down our decay the envelopes are actually really cool so by turning this fader up it's turning the decay down and if i press a you can see a better uh higher resolution of what the envelope is actually doing um it's a pretty high res envelope which is really cool because it's percentage based not time based like most synthesizers so this is actually a percentage of your entire sample so if your sample is 30 minutes long and you set your attack to 50 your attack's 15 minutes long i don't know why you would ever want to do that you never know you could do whatever you want but if i go to this alpha beta kappa gamma logo i don't i don't know what that sign is forgive me it's probably something musical related and i sound like a fool you can kind of turn down the overall um amount of time or percentage to time of your sample percentage to time of sample yeah i think that makes sense so i can make it really short no that's not what i wanted why would you do that what are you doing no stop moving that okay cool so that's there we'll go to level multi same thing okay cool that'll work [Music] sure let's go to our hats now which is this one here i'll turn the level down this gets kind of confusing at times because you have to kind of think of this a bit backwards if you're coming from the mpc world where you set up the way the sound sounds first then record it into the sequence because if i were to record this this loud into the sequence and then i just go to my level and bring the level down it's not going to do anything unless i select override this i'll talk about this more later but here we'll go ahead and set this down actually you know i'll just go to multi-mode level [Music] sure [Music] awesome that's the sound here i want to set this to a high pass [Music] that's pretty cool shift b i'm already here modify pattern so what i just did by modifying the pattern is committed these filter settings to the pattern itself you kind of have to do this because if i were to turn this off it would just jump back to where it was and that also turns off when you hit record again more on that later because that's kind of my biggest gripe with this thing but i guess it kind of makes sense for having this weird multi-mode way of working so we have this here we'll go to level same thing multiple [Music] sure that'll work [Music] so this sample is a little funky you can kind of hear it there it's like so what i'm going to do is go to our loop slice of this press a and yeah there's a bunch of air there at the beginning so this is actually pretty nice because you have i think this is percentage this is milliseconds and then this is by sample so i can go here zoom in oh god and then go in by okay maybe a little bit oh easy partner easy cool you hit save and i want to save this file and uh let's see if that fixed it awesome that fixed it let me go ahead and check this out okay that sounds already good wait why did that just get super loud [Music] okay i have no idea why that got loud and now it's quiet again [Music] the hell was that about another quick note this is not the absolute latest firmware because the latest firmware was crazy buggy compared to this one i had a bunch of sounds dropping out random knobs registering values when i wasn't touching them i'd be over here and something over there would move so i went back one tick and it's way better but it still kind of does some funky stuff okay where are we at we are here let's get to the moment we've all been waiting for i'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this pattern to four bars and listen to our keys something i sampled from the nord we'll go multi-pitch [Music] what's called the multis you also have filter settings for each individual pad that's pretty cool so um let's yeah let's go to record this [Music] awesome [Music] put an envelope we can look at this envelope here and we can change its filter amount so we can say um what is it we have this and i can jump over to filter oh right this is kind of that weird over overriding type of thing now i need to go here and modify this pattern there now you can hear it happening you don't hear it as you're editing unless you set it to override mode but again more on that later it's really funky so this is kind of the beat we got so far took a couple seconds [Music] all right i got the pattern going and it's pretty cool uh but as far as pushing it further than here this is where its limitations and creativity will take you further because there are no lfos and the original sp 1200 didn't have any lfos either that's fine there are however some useful envelopes which you kind of saw me mess with but they only go to your amp aka volume pitch and filter and there are no effects like a delay or reverb on this thing you do have a ton of banks but only eight voices and you could also get creative with things like copying samples multi-modes and that modify pattern feature which is one of the things i love only because this does something that is super backwards to me and that feature kind of saves saves my life for uh an exaggeration and by the way a lot of what this does is exactly the way that the ogsp 1200 does so it makes sense for things like i said the no lfos limited modulation and eight voices but sometimes i just kind of question why in this day and age you know but i guess that's probably an entire separate video so okay my main list of cons and some pros but uh let's get to that after a quick shout out to today's video sponsor squarespace i've been using squarespace for ever and i've built multiple websites on squarespace and i keep suggesting it to my friends whenever they want to do anything artistic e-commerce or just have a nice landing page to 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and move this around nothing's happening because the pitch is already recorded with the sequence but if i press a it will override the current value of whatever the parameter is right cool but as soon as i hit record that override turns off if i press it again nothing happens right but if i turn this off now it's back so what you need to do is you kind of say you want it here you hit shift a scroll down to modify pattern click scroll down click now this is committed to that pattern so if we're here and i take that off it goes back to the pattern that i set or goes back to the way i set the parameter to this pattern kind of weird kind of funky because cool i like let's just do -1 shift a scroll down modify scroll down enter kind of weird same thing with envelopes like if i wanted this to be a little shorter i go here you can't really hear it right you can't hear it at all yeah i can't hear it at all but if i go shift a and modify pattern and select it now it adds that value to the recorded to the recorded sequence it's it's kind of funky right what is the i forget how to go back it's a copy race yeah there we go cool at least there's an undo so in case you do something weird so that always kind of bugged me and this is probably heavily tied to the ability to use the multis to record multiple states of parameters at once based on which pad you hit which is awesome but i just wish that there was a quicker way to take like a big booming kick or a big booming bass line and turn it down into like a shortened kick and yes you can set the s2400 to an override all and set it to uh the track as well as the parameter instead of a global thing so that's a plus but i just kind of i don't know it's kind of a funky way where you should have to focus on what the sound is prior to recording it in i'm kind of the opposite i kind of get the sounds in roughly and fine-tune it as it plays back kind of like the way i do on my npc's which you can do you just need to constantly modify the patterns which is a few steps and second this one's a bit nitpicky but the number pad is numbered this is like wearing a raincoat with an umbrella over your head indoors while it's raining outside i mean okay that's a major stretch but i just wish that they would have utilized the font section on here a bit more because there's a lot to remember on this device thankfully there is a help button which i am constantly pressing as i get better with muscle memory but that memory is hard to achieve since the number pad section is constantly changing depending on what page you're on and with that being said the number pads don't always enter in numbers even if the parameter you want to change is number based for example if i were to go back i can change my patterns that's cool oh god but if i go to let's say my envelopes and i go here and i want to change what this is and i press f5 nothing happens i start turning on some crazy settings of what i don't even know yet unless i press help third would be the build quality i don't want to spend too much time here but it's exceptional in some areas and okay in others and it's also way too damn heavy i don't know why like mega heavy it's really really heavy it makes me not want to take it out for a gig because it would just break my backpack straps or something also the faders are let me get back here the faders are like a little loose for my liking they feel kind of a little too light it's kind of i don't know i guess it's all preference they just kind of feel a little meh to me and you know i want them to have a little bit of resistance when i'm trying to dial in that precise pitch multi oh this is what i wanted to mention earlier but i decided to not even go into it which is these mute and solo buttons they are not good at all this kind of starts giving me uh flashbacks to the chord bot they're super soft but don't respond until you just like put your finger away okay hold on i probably couldn't say that better uh until you press harder for example check this out if i go to let's say tr8s mode which i was already in i can press this all day long and there i have to like jam my finger in it's come on buddy you know you really have to like sit there and focus on what you're pressing in order to turn it on because if you just go like this but just a couple yeah see it's just it's it's a it's hitter turn off it's hit or miss and again this could kind of be a my device thing and yours might be better i don't know but they're just uh a little questionable and i think what sucks sometimes too is like when i'm really focused on pushing this sometimes my finger will hit you know my traditional fingers will hit one of the pads and now i'm editing something that i didn't even want to edit to begin with but outside of that the rest of the build is awesome the pads are sensitive they feel good-ish the knobs on here are super nice these hard buttons that are aligned the um the s 2400 are really legit and feel like they're going to last for a long time as well as this main encoder with the select feels feels really good and the foot pads on this thing are like for a hummer or something i would have been fine with rubber feet i don't know who asked for this lastly would be the song mode oh my god this thing is confusing maybe it takes some time but it's like 10 10 black box funky you're adding parts but then you have to kind of add the repeats first and they're all separated events which is weird and i know this will eventually lead to some really fun cool ways to make a song that does a bunch of cool interesting things as it plays out but by default just to play one pattern to the next it's it's a bit tough i mean here watch so i can go and move down song one uh no i'm trying to get to help okay cool here we go so what's the first step i want to add a pattern we'll just play pattern 10 right and then i want to do a repeat so add repeat yes but the repeat goes to the stop so right now i'm repeating the stop twice but to add to go up here i want to add a repeat to this so i say add repeat but it keeps adding it underneath so i'm like okay what so we'll just erase this event we'll go above this hit repeat yes repeat pattern 10 twice and then what do i want to do after this i want to play you know pattern one i got to go up to change four times then here so it kind of always goes down but i just kind of wish the repeats were changed because if i were to add another tempo change repeat you know you have a bunch of cool different things you can do and you can even dive in a bit further and actually change a bunch of different parameters per part but it's really kind of confusing and again i wish that these number pads had some font dedicated to at least one thing on here that would help kind of speed up the workflow and the muscle memory of this thing because to know that f1 is number one and that f2 is number two i know i know it says it right there you know and then for nothing to have f2 or f3 labeled like if i were to go to an envelope like i press this it lights up but it doesn't tell me what it's doing at all i press one or two or three same thing no idea what's happening but they are actually doing things oh whoa whoa whoa no no no how do i go down in the i want to look at help see look now that's doing this thing okay you know what let's let's uh let's get to some pros i swear i don't hate this thing the sound is amazing it sounds really good to me the crunch the punch the alias it's all delicious and this tr8 the tr mode is pretty cool and i i can definitely see this being useful to some i just wish that the mutant solo buttons didn't suck this much and the workflow of this thing can be very very fast it packs a ton of features more than i think it needs and sometimes it kind of starts to feel like that homer simpson car that he got to design that one time with all the cup holders but if you kind of just focus on using this in a simple way it's incredible and incredibly fast and this whole multi-mode workflow is amazing i love the ability to have different pads be set to different parameters and then being able to record all that into the sequence i do wish however under the pitch it did have some scales like major or minor i think as diatonic and harmonic or something like that i just want there to be more and i know all of this kind of goes against what i mentioned earlier with that weirder modify pattern issue which basically you know destroys this situation but maybe have like a separate amp or you know for some basic levels or basic amp tuning i mean i guess i can use the override either way there's there's no excuses to make music nowadays so stop complaining me it's also oh another big thing is this also has usb audio and it's so good works exactly as you would expect and lastly this is a funky one but i love that the envelopes are percentage based not time based and they go across your whole sample i just think that that's really cool would i keep this thing for now will it end up in the closet in a few weeks maybe probably but not really sure yet i'm trying to really learn this thing and you know it sounds badass and if i just focus in on what i want it to do it gets me there quickly and easily otherwise i just start asking too many questions and i get kind of lost and uh yeah either way that's it for me thanks for kicking it as always i appreciate you love you hope to see you again next week and until then you already know what to do and that is to share the love share the knowledge knowledge is power peace what where'd my track go [Music] what track is this oh yeah that's the other track i made [Music] [Music] [Music] bye

Channel: Ricky Tinez

Views: 47,901

Rating: 4.8078742 out of 5

Keywords: ricky tinez, enrique martinez, ricky tines, sweetwater, S2400, Isla Instruments, isla instruments, sp1200, isla instruments s2400, s2400 review, S-2400, best sampler 2021, sampler alias, alias, aliasing, lofi sampler, lo-fi, lofi sampler, lofi, sampler, sp404

Id: 4-9m9wWq6pM

Length: 25min 6sec (1506 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021