Sp 404 Mk2 Sampler Review - First thoughts, feels unfinished

[Music] i managed to get my hands on the 404 mk2 i'll do a review for you today let's talk about this thing i have some some things that i wish that they can improve that's why you see in the title of the video saying that i feel it's unfinished i'm not saying because of that i would sell this i would buy it again if i had to it's a great sampler if anyone's doing low-fi ish boom-bap type of music whatever you're doing if you like that dirty sound this is the unit to have it has amazing effects they've upgraded the effects they've created new effects you have plus effects inside there that it's just so easy to run your samples through resample it to other machines or just do it inside of the 404 because of the sequencer so if you're looking for a sampler this thing is a great sampler to have and to mention as well the price it didn't boost up the price just because it is a new unit they kept the same price showing the people that followed the 404 for many years that they're really in it for the community they're not just trying to rip off some extra dollars from the community they're actually giving back by updating the unit with an oled screen with all the new functions like mute groups things like that that really help working with samples so it's it's great to see that they didn't just increase the price because they could they kept the same price as the last unit oled it's an amazing oled you can see everything in there means that you can really improve on a lot of things in the future with new updates they can change whatever they feel like adding to the screen i would really love to see the sequencer in the screen where you could go in and just move the midi notes individual midi notes change the volume of the midi notes it would really it would be like a great update for me to have that sequencer um you know just be updated because to me that that is really the downside of this machine is the sequencer it's just it's weak they should really improve on it but i feel like sometimes they're still catering towards the their audience that really works with resampling so but you know it is what it is i'm not mad about that i just wish that they could you know improve the sequencer it feels like it's the same one on the previous 404a the chopping is a lot better than what it was before you have the omed there are a few things that i wish they could change on the chopping just just one would be to assign the chop to the pad i just really love doing this sort of chopping just going through the entire sample i would i normally like to take a big chunk and then just go through it manually and find my chops and then assign it to a pad and it would be cool to have the option here to assign to pad that's really all it is when using the chopping function here you always have to divide this into um into even bits and then you cannot overlap slices and you can't just take one of the slices out so i mean i haven't worked much with this maybe i'm saying something wrong but it's just not really the way i like to work but hey it's not a big issue because i can always just select like the the uh the area that i want from the main sample and then just copy this to another pad and then keep on chopping like that then i can slice another bit in another area and keep on doing it like that so it's not really a big issue but it would be cool to see in the menu the option to assign to pad without having to copy i just like working that way that's how i work with the npc as well but yeah but comparing the two real quick one of the great things and i think that's really the crown jewel of the 404 is the effects um comparing it with the uh with the mpc i really prefer this and because it's catered towards the type of sound i make like i wouldn't make pop music in here unless you want your pop music to sound dirty you know because it feels like everything every effects in here are catered towards that and made towards people that like saturating their sounds like making their sounds sound like it's coming from a cassette it's like you know it really it is really meant for that it's they're catering towards that audience and and it shows like because it's easy to overdo it's easy to add a lot of flavor to into the music if you're not careful i was making beats with it and at a point like i had way too much filters already on my samples i was resampling everything and adding too much so it's super easy to add too much flavor with this machine so you always have to be careful i mean to me i i have to be careful without uh not adding too much because the filters in here they're amazing all the effects they added are amazing all of them can be used to do something to your sound all of them with the npcs kind of they're still there but they're harder to work with because it's a machine that's meant for everyone in the market like people that do in pop music can use the npc people that are doing trap they're doing whatever man whatever sounds you're making you can do it on that and the effects are harder to work for you to get to a more low-fi issue five because the set the effects aren't created for that they're created for an overall a general population of producers that you know you can to weak it and make it sound dirty but it's much easier to do it here because they feel it feels like the sample it feels like the effects are meant to do that and they actually are and if you're thinking about using the two aside that's probably a great combination make videos on that in the future unfortunately the midi in this doesn't seem too good i was trying to uh just use the sequencer in here and sending my midi messages to here but somehow it doesn't work too well really the only issue i had with midi is that my uh my midi track here will only trigger the pads in bank a it will not trigger any other samples on any other pad bank i don't know why but it will only trigger the samples on pad bank a yes you can use this as an audio interface but there's some issue with sampling hertz which means this is at 48 and the that is at 44 which i don't think that they can work together but if you're using this in controller mode then they can be used together but it isn't all that i've tried it i've tried using this and that together uh at 48 kilohertz but you won't be able to resample via this it's the same thing as sending the audio and then back in again would be exactly the same i'll show you in another video with workflows okay but yeah if you tap on on the npc pads they kind of like stick to your fingers so they don't your fingers don't slide in here they slide a little bit but with time i think they'll probably end up uh offering some resistance on the touch i'm not feeling the drummer so i don't really care too much about having uh bigger pads these ones they're just fine for me i've had some issues with the sequencer in here it feels like on the last part of the loop when i try to input the kick like really on the last 16th note of the loop it doesn't record it just it pushes it into the uh the first bar again so there are some issues with the sequencer in this there's no song mode in here i think it would just with a no light display you can add a song mode just instead of tapping on the past telling it which one you want to go next why not just have the oled option to input the notes there people have talked about this chromatic mode cannot be recorded which is useless at this point which i don't know maybe it's good for you to try things out if again if you're working with resampling then you can record into the loop if you're resampling it you can record it on top of the drum loop that you're creating which works great and it feels again it feels like they're giving this to the people that are working with resampling because most people are when they're working with the 404 but i think they'll be coming up with updates hopefully and they'll start changing things in the 404 one of the things hopefully will be uh the ability to record the chromatic function into the pattern sequencer one thing that could improve the workflow would be to print the effect to the pad instead of just going into the resampling function and re-sampling the pad to another pad why don't just have the print effect to pad and that would just you know make the workflow a lot better because you can't have an effect per pad which means you're going to have to resample and if you're going to have to resample why not just cut all that work of going into the re-sample resample to another pad and then chop in the other pad and doing all these things where you can just print the effect to the pad and that will just you know take you like two minutes off of your hands because the npc already has that it's called um it's called flatten the pad on the mpc it feels like an npc in certain ways as well this thing and that's why i think i really love it because it has all the things that i need on an npc which is mute groups uh paddlings which is simultaneous play i would really love to see pat mutes on this i think it's one of the great things about the npc that you can play just muting the drums unmuting the drums uh i would love to see that workflow on this one another thing that i feel like needs improvement is plug in this via usb into the laptop and actually c in the sd card because it doesn't show up on on the computer i know if i don't know if there's something wrong i'm doing but it just doesn't show up there and i have to take the sd card out plug it in and then i can transfer my files because what i'm doing actually now is actually have this connected to the laptop via the usb because i can sample straight from the computer if i want and the reason why i'm doing that is because previewing sounds on this is again needs improvement so if i want to preview a sample i'll go into the shift import export i want to import and i want to import sample i'll go into whichever folder i want and then i'll assign something to a pass okay i want to assign i have to select the pad let me select this pad right there i'll press enter it loads it up and then it goes back into the main screen so this is bad workflow this it should go back to the folder where i was at because you know now i have to do the same thing import import sample go into the folder that i was i don't even know which folder was but i have to go back into it and then choose the other sample so i wish you could just always default back to this screen where i was and not go into the main screen as it does like that because of that i'm actually just plugging this into the computer and just loading my samples from the computer via the resample function i can just be on my folders on the computer just you know choosing a sample resampling it through the resample function into a pad much easier than to be using the preview at this point but again that's one of the great things about this unit is to actually resample whatever you're hearing in the computer it's just amazing something that i've always wanted on the npc it's actually here so i have the usb into the computer if i'm watching a movie if i'm listening to whatever on youtube i can quickly go into the mark which is the skip back function and whatever i heard on my computer is now on my sp so it's super super easy to sample the skip back function is really amazing if you're just jamming something out and you really like what you did there you can actually go into the skip back and everything was recorded so i think it would cost 25 seconds in for people that work with sampling having that is game changing really so brilliant from from rowan to to include that so yeah but nonetheless please improve the preview function it's better just to have this plug into your computer into previewing on your computer and resampling it to a pad because you can't be playing a sequence here and going into the preview at the same time yeah another bad thing about previewing samples is that you cannot hear it when you're when you have a pattern playing so if i have the sequencer play and if i want to try to go into the import it says exit the pattern select so i have to go and stop the sequence and now i can go and import samples this is why i prefer to just sample straight from the computer having the sp 404 actually connected to my laptop and whatever i play on a laptop it gets recorded into the sp404 so if i'm in the studio i'll probably have this connected to my laptop just so i can sample anything i want i can work with this machine as it is but there's a lot of things that could be improved and that's one of the things which is for some reason whenever a pattern is playing you cannot go into another window one of the annoying things about this is that you always need to be exiting screens to go into another screen it doesn't make much sense if i'm already selecting shift to go into another screen it means i want to get out of the other screen why do i need to pre press exit to exit the screen to go into another one if if it needs to stop the pattern for me to go into the other screen just stop the pattern if that's what it takes but don't make me be you know pressing extra buttons to just to do a simple thing now i want to go into the chromatic oh you have to exit the screen all right so just exit the screen for do it for me i don't why do i need to do this and then do that and then do that like four extra steps just to do what i wanted in the first place these are kind of like requests at this point but there are a lot of things that i feel like need improvement like why can't i copy to several pads at the same time to have different effects or to have different shops whatever it is it's a great unit i really like it it is here to stay in the studio i'm going to make a lot of beats with this thing i really like the way it sounds whatever i said that needs update they'll probably bring it in an update uh and even if they don't it's not a deal breaker for me i'll still be working with this thing because it just sounds great i really want that sequencer to be better though i was lucky to get this unit actually it feels like everyone wants to get one of these but they're only going to be available in like two months or something like that i actually got this unit from a local shop here in portugal uh i don't know but they had one there so i just bought it i was actually lucky because i was thinking i would only get a unit like in march maybe february uh but actually have it right here because i just decided to phone up a local shop and they had it so i was lucky with that um and i'm making beats with it and some videos for you guys as well i'll be making more videos with this uh alongside the npc just to explore workflows 60 of course and just sampling stuff from the roads into here i've been testing that out it just sounds amazing i love the effects in this thing more than anything the effects in here are just amazing thank you so much for watching and i'll see you on the next one peace take care

Channel: Marlow Digs

Views: 10,715

Keywords: SP 404, sp 303, sp 202, sampler, sp 404 mk2, music production, lofi sampler, lo fi, low fi, beats, making beats, lofi beats, boombap, hip hop, samples, sampled beats, j dilla, mad lib, pete rock, best sampler, review

Id: 62HOaocEIFY

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021