The SP404 MK2 IS HERE // Huge new feature walkthrough

so do so [Music] what is up guys and welcome back to the channel and what a day we have today i'm here with the brand new sp the sp404 mark ii and this is just such an exciting day for roland for the community for the channel this is the first major release we've had since i've started this channel i think that just puts things into perspective a little bit we had the 404a which was a bit of a disappointing update for the community i think because there wasn't really much in terms of the actual device that got updated apart from the colours and some additional software that was inside that box to help it sync up with other roland products but guys this really is a huge huge update and i'm super super excited to be sharing this with you i want to say a massive shout out to roland for hooking up with me about this and getting this unit to me i've actually had this for a few weeks and it has been absolutely excruciating keeping this a secret from you guys obviously we were really disappointed about the leaks that came out because we wanted this to be a huge surprise and i was kind of going to be a part of it as well so when the leaks came out it was kind of a bit disappointing but at the same time i think it built a little bit of hype as well so we're here now anyway and i can finally talk about it so yeah i do want to apologize to everyone that's kind of asked me about this product and i've had to sort of dance around the topic a little bit because i was actually under contract with roland not to say anything until today so this is the first time i've been allowed to actually talk about this publicly and yeah i like to say i've had this a few i think i've had this a couple of months so i've had time to get acquainted with it i've had time to start looking at the new features and i have had a draft manual uh not the full finished version yet so i don't know absolutely every detail yet and obviously i'm taking in a lot of information about this device so i'm getting there slowly and this is going to be a long video guys what i want to do in this video is talk about loads of the new features on this unit now i'm not going to go into extreme details here i'm actually just going to kind of do a whistle stop tour of all the uh of all the new features some of them i will demonstrate others i will just literally explain how or what it does and not actually show you guys because i'm going to be doing a lot of videos about this product uh in the future obviously so i don't want to do basically 20 30 videos all compressed into one i want to do a whistle stop tour of everything that this can do show you some of the key ones which i think are amazing and then later down the line obviously i'll be looking at each individual aspect of this product and doing it in much much more detail so yeah again a huge shout out to roland i've been in touch with them over the past few months regularly i don't want to name names in case they don't want to be named so just want to say thanks to the team there and thank you for getting this out to me i'm absolutely ecstatic about this release it's such a huge update to the sx or the a and yeah guys i think you're going to love some of the new features on this so let's get this set up on the table guys because i am desperate to show you about these new features i think you're going to absolutely love them and this really really is a serious update so yeah let's get this set up let's get the different cameras set up and let's start talking about these new features because i'm super super excited to show you okay guys so here we are at the device and as you can see it's pretty similar but there are a lot of differences under the hood and there are big differences in certain things as well so obviously i'll go into more detail about those but the first thing we notice is the four dials at the top they're super similar to the last model although they've got a way better feel to them they feel just a bit more solid in your fingers i actually really like the feel of those you've got the six effects buttons and the mfx button i'll go into more detail about this but these are changeable as well uh the screen is massively updated i'll get that turned on in a minute but i want to move the device around a little bit first uh this is brand new this is called the value button and this has got the kind of mpc click to it hopefully you can hear that and that is also a push button as well so that is for zooming in and out on the screen going through the menus going through dialog menus and all that kind of thing that's the job of this and the button is used to confirm stuff as well a little bit further down we're looking very similar start and pitch speed mark a few new features straight away on the buttons uh but generally speaking that's quite similar to what we're used to already moving down a little bit further obviously 16 pads now which is brilliant i absolutely love the fact that they've managed to squeeze these on this is only slightly taller than the 404sx and the a but they've managed to squeeze a whole row of extra pads on so 16 pads in the bank absolutely perfect that always seems to be a kind of nice amount to have and obviously very similar to the npc now in the sense that we've got access to 16 per bank so hopefully you can see this properly i'm kind of holding at an angle so the light's catching it right we've got two inputs for the headphones which is a really nice touch so if you don't have those adapters you won't need to worry about that anymore and also if your headphones do require an adapter you don't have to be worrying about changing it anymore every time you need to use this device this will be super handy for me using the 202 and this all the time it will mean if i want to change between the two of my headphones i don't need to put the adapter on which used to be really really annoying uh we've got the input here and there's a choice between mic and guitar now this is to do with impedance uh so depending on what device you're using you can change between the two there's no internal mic anymore which is a bit of a shame but obviously we have that import so we could just put mic into there if we need to on the back of the device very similar we've got the battery compartment like the old one so we are still on batteries it requires six double a batteries and there's arguments for and against this so batteries are always going to be available really they're pretty solid whereas internal batteries can actually die over time and then you're kind of stuck with that battery so that is quite a good argument for it you could also get rechargeable ones as well to make it a bit more eco-friendly and a bit more friendly to the wallet as well at the top on the side here that's where the sd card goes in now it's through the top which is quite cool and yeah not really much to talk about in that it's sd and yeah that's where it goes in and here we go this is where we see a big update on the top we've got the same sort of input for the power we've got the power on and off we've got usb c which according to the current manual which i've got that is actually able to stream music through so you can stream music from your devices and record we've got midi in and out but they're the 3.5 millimeter jack inputs uh line in line out they've completely ditched funnel and now we've got double jack the uh the three quarter inch jacks for both of those so that's a big big update and i think a few people have already mentioned about that being a really good news so i'm not savvy enough technically to know the difference but i assume you can get a better signal through these i don't know please let me know in the comments below if you know why the other side is completely blank and yeah that's pretty much everything physically and yeah overall this is a lot lighter than the 404sx as well that's something i noticed straight away i was holding the two together and this is incredibly light so that's really really good news as well because obviously roland have stuck with the portable feel of this they're stuck with the smaller size and the fact that it's become even lighter just means it's going to be even better carrying this around it's going to be even easier so the next thing i want to do is get this plugged in and i can start talking about some of the features to you so let's get the power in and let's get this switched on and you'll see that nothing actually happens when you switch it on straight away then we get this and kind of a cool little animation to say it's the mark ii and now you can see the screen for the first time so the screen is a huge update basically um i'll get into more detail about that in a minute and yeah as you can tell from me showing you around this on the intro as well that generally speaking there's a much more modern and sleek look to this so they've kind of killed off the classic vibe of this device completely now and this has become a much slicker looking product at first i was a little disappointed with the look i thought they may have tried to keep things a bit classic but the more i've looked at this and the more i've used it it does make sense to modernize the feel of it i think and i've actually started to like it i want to move on to the buttons next so the buttons at the top very similar to what they were like on the sx and the a they've got that nice kind of spongy feel they're very rubberized uh but they're definitely not as clicky as the sx the stock ones they're very similar to the fat pads that i've picked up for mine same applies to these they've got a nice spongy kind of feel to them and down here the 1 to 16 pads first of all they're velocity sensitive which is just crazy but you can set fixed velocity as well they go fixed velocity off fixed velocity on really easy it's just a shift in one and they've got a very very firm feel to them the profile of them is much lower than the previous versions and then the row down the side here they've got more of a clicky feel to them it's actually only these three buttons subpad is the same sub pad's got that kind of firm feel to it um but the three buttons down here are much more like clicky and the ones in the center have got like a really firm feel to them so they're really really nice to play and yeah overall the pads feel amazing though it's a massive update to the stock pads that you got on the sx the fat pads on the sx are actually kind of like but still these are definitely an improvement so yeah really really happy with the update on that i think you guys are gonna like the feel of the pads it feels much more like a serious sampler now rather than a toy it's kind of moving away from that toy vibe this is becoming a serious piece of gear and yeah the pads really do help to add to that kind of premium feel of this product okay so the first feature i'm going to show you is the 16 levels so we now have 16 levels on this device and we have chromatic as well so i've got this little sample in here and i'm going to go ahead and show you how these two work so first of all i'll show you velocity 16 velocity which is button two so what you have to do is hit the pad you want to do it to first so i'm gonna do that to pad one and i'm gonna do shift and two as you can see they're exactly like the npc the velocity slowly decreases the further you get down to the bottom left hand of the bank that you're working in so quickly moving on to chromatic that's shift and four [Music] sounds super super nice and the pitch bending on those samples or the time stretching sounds absolutely perfect as well it sounds really really nice so pitching those down on this scale adds a really nice vibe to these samples as you could hear from that [Music] so they're the two modes that you can apply to the 16 pads now the next thing you're all going to be desperate to hear about this is the pitch speed and straight away guys you can feel very relieved about this because the pitch shifting is brilliant so let's go ahead and get out of this by pressing exit let's use this one let's use this sample again and all you have to do is go to pitch and speed and we'll bring this down [Music] and how good does that sound there's no artifacts on it whatsoever it just sounds really really nice and you can obviously pitch up as well [Music] absolutely incredible stuff from roland on that and as you can see there you're getting way more information on the screen now as well the dialog is a lot more detailed it's shown as the speed it's shown as the bpm that you're changing it to if you hold shift there you can see it's saying if you hold shift and use the dial then it's going to fine tune that the pitch mode is in vinyl at the moment and yeah says the volume as well so the pitch shifting it's incredible guys it's not got the same character as you'd have on the 202 obviously that's going to be basically impossible to replicate but as a pitch shifter you're getting no artifacts you're getting a really smooth sound from it so overall absolutely no complaints with me obviously you can dirty up with the mfx later anyway so yeah we finally got a 404 with really really good pitch shifting so super super happy with that update okay another quick one which i've got over here is roll which is quite an interesting one so we've got a roll button here and what this actually does is a kind of you know like a hi-hat rolling trap or something like that [Music] and you can change the timing of the roll as well by holding shift as you can see underneath it says roll set and we can change that to whatever we want up to 164 one over 64. [Music] so if we did want to go and try that on a hi-hat we could hold this one and you get the roll effect like that so that's a nice little button that they've included and a cool little effect which obviously we'll be having a lot of fun with experiment and seeing what ideas we can come up with that okay moving on to the pattern side of things now i'm not going to demonstrate all these things because it's going to take too long and this video is going to be a long one anyway but great news for everyone you can re-sample patterns now obviously that is huge for us so it works in exactly the same way as resample all you do is you set up resample and record you go into your pattern and start playing it and it will just record that onto a pad on that on the bank that you've selected before you've gone into pattern select so yeah guys that's here as well we can now get pattern select we can use that pattern we can resample it onto a pad and start adding effects and messing around with that as well and on the pattern select as well another feature which i think is really cool is you can now chain patterns together exactly like you can on the po-33 so you can tap in which patterns you want to use in which order and it'll play through them in that order so that's another great feature that they've added with patterns as well they've also introduced this thing which i'm not going to go into either because i'm going to end up doing a whole video about pattern select because there's so much new stuff in there you can now copy patterns and then connect them back together again you can concatenate them so that's just unreal and then also you can trim bits out that you don't want as well so it's just unreal how much detail they've gone into with this update guys there's just so many more features and i'm only about halfway through already here so big wholesale changes on the pattern select mode and i'll be doing a completely separate video about that but yeah super exciting stuff on that another huge update you can blend internal and external recording now wow we wanted this so badly this has definitely got to be a feature that if you could choose to have it you would have it so you can now choose when you're doing external source you can either choose whether you want to have it as a mix or completely as external so yeah you can blend both what's inside the box and with what's coming into the box as well like you can on a 303 so that's a huge huge update which is amazing i know it's already been done on the 303 but it's great that that's back inside this unit okay the next big thing is fx buses now i need to spend a bit more time getting to know this but i do understand the general concept this bus fx over here has got two buses and basically what you can do is assign effects to those buses and then you can assign those effects to different pads so you could have some pads with bus one some pads with bus two and then there's also an additional two other buses so bus three and bus four what you can do with those is set effects on them that apply to everything inside the unit so you get control over the two effects that you have on the pads and then you get control over what's going on over all of the pads as well so there's effect stacking now unreal stuff again we were able to stack more than one effect and yeah you can say so let's say for example in this bus one we want to have an effect of 404 vinyl sim and in bus two maybe we want this new lo-fi effect and i'll just turn that down for now but as you can hopefully see there we now have bus one with 404 vinyl sim on bus two with lo-fi and if you want to turn those off you just select the one you want and press the mfx button again and that bypasses it so if i hit that again you can see it's back on press it again it bypasses it depending on which one you've got highlighted so you can just bring those in and out which is really really cool and yeah like i mentioned as well those additional buses three and four you can assign effects to those and have all these effects stacked it's just so much better than what we had on the sx it's so much more flexible so yeah loads we can do with that and very very exciting stuff there are new effects i'll go through those in a separate video as well because obviously i don't want to go through every single effect on this video but yeah there's new effects there's uh scatter downer how do kodama zanzu i don't know what these do yeah two guro uh sbf stopper tape echo time control delay super filter wrm saturation 303 vinyl sim 303 vinyl sim on an sp404 what the hell brilliant 404 vinyl sim cassette sim lo-fi and then reverb chorus juno chorus flanger phaser war slicer tremolo pan chromatic hyper resonator ring mod crusher overdrive distortion equalizer and compressor so a lot of effects there and they're all the effects in the mfx rack and then obviously we've got the filter the isolator resonator dj effects sleep print delay up here now i actually saw a comment saying why have they designated a button to dj effect sleeper or why to resonator guess what it doesn't matter because you can change what these buttons are assigned to so you hit shift on effects settings which is 16 and you get these menus it's originally showing the bus 1 and bus 2 3 and 4 you scroll across using dial 4 and you get to direct and as you can see now here the filter is flashing and then you can just change what's what's actually assigned to that to that uh pad so that's incredible you can have all your favorite effects up here instead of the stock ones which are labeled on here obviously it's a little bit confusing because the button names are on there maybe it would have been cool if they just called this effect one to six and then you could assign whatever you wanted to it but yeah i mean you can still do it so that's really really cool okay probably one of the most exciting features that they've included in here is this feature called skip back sampling which is just unreal so basically i don't know if you can see here but my mark button is constantly flashing uh on and off it's kind of pulsing and what this is doing is it's listening to everything that's going on inside the inside the device constantly and if you pause for a second it will pause itself and then it starts again and i think it does it for approximately 25 to 26 seconds and what that'll do it's just unbelievable this feature you can play something and it will store that and then you can go and assign it to a pad so i'm going to attempt to try and show you something here real quick obviously timers of the essence in this video because there's a lot to get through okay so i've got something here i've got a few chops this is nothing serious guys this is purely just to show you how this works let's just jam a little thing out and then i'll show you how you can access it [Music] and then you go to mark and you can see it says skip back and you can see the waveform of what you've just performed so you can then use subpad to play through it [Music] and you can use the dials to select the start and end point so you can edit the waveform in here and you can zoom in using this dial as well so you can get this super super precise using the value dial i've zoomed right in here you can see and i'm getting right at the start of that and then i can do menu i can truncate it okay so once i've trimmed that and done what i want to do with it i then hit record and then you can save that to a pad so select pad to save i'm just gonna hit on 16 it does it straight away operation complete i'll come out of that and that bit which i was just performing is now on a pad and i can resample it and add effects and all that kind of thing so that feature is absolutely unreal so as long as this mark button is pulsing this device is listening to what you're performing unbelievable feature that i really really like that and i think that's going to be huge for the beat making community i can't wait to do an actual video just based on that particular feature i think it's just so cool now you've already seen there i gave you a little bit of a hint that you can actually now edit samples on the screen so let's go ahead and go across this other bank so i've got this little um sample here and i can just go to start and end and again you can use this value dial to zoom in and out and you can see here that at the start of the sample there's a bit which i don't want is a bit of dead space so i can just use this dial to trim it that's my start point and you can trim the endpoint as well you hopefully you can see there's an s and any at either end which is just obviously start and end so trim that and then you just hit the value button and you do truncate it does what it needs to do you come out of that and the start has been cut off absolutely brilliant and you can also envelope that as well so if you do shift and pitch speed you then just use dials one and four uh dials two and four again and i hope you can see this as well that it's actually adding an envelope to the start in terms of the volume and you can set the release as well i don't want anything on this one but you can imagine that if you want that ducking effect for your kick to come through like a side chain compression effect you could do this to start your sample so that is absolutely awesome that you can do that as well so there's a couple of little features uh to do with trimming samples and working with samples and the next thing that i want to show you is chop mode now this is just incredible as well i absolutely love this so if i've got this sample i want to chop it up i don't want to use just this whole sample so you do shift and start and then you can see underneath it says chop and i'm going to go ahead and start playing this and it's going to highlight the pads afterwards for me to set new chop points so let me show you what it does [Music] you can go ahead and preview those like i just did there so you can preview your mark points and then when you're happy with it you do mark and you do assign it to a pad or you can delete all marks or you can do auto mark as well if you want to assign to pad so here it's basically saying you've done five chops which pads do you want those five chops on so you just go through assign them and then you press enter on the value dial and now those chops [Music] [Music] obviously i've not shot them very well i'd have to go back and do those properly and i could truncate them and everything but you get the idea with that guys that's super super cool so you can just sample in large sections of audio and then use that to chop them up instead of having to do it individually or using that old school resample method which we used to do with resample and mark so that's dad now you can just use the chop feature and it's unbelievable and very very useful okay another thing that you can do is paddling group so you can actually set things to trigger at the same time so i need to get some drums back for this uh let me see where i can find them okay so i've got a snare hi-hat and a kick here and i want to let's say i want the hi-hat and the snare to trigger at the same time for no particular reason other from this example you can see here it says seven pad link you hit that i've hit the two samples that i want to be linked and then that's it all you have to do is press exit [Music] and i'll just add another one actually because that's not that obvious um i'll just add the kick as well come out of it and hopefully you can hear they're all triggering at the same time now but you only have to press one that's really really cool to undo that you do have to go back in and untick them which is slightly annoying but i mean it's a great feature and that's not much of a sacrifice to have to make another one as well this is another huge update mute groups wow so let's set up a mute group shift mute group you select the pads that you want to be in a mute group you come out of it let's take gate off so i can show you this turn this up a bit [Music] moments how good is that and then you can just go into new group again and unselect them if you don't want them anymore and press escape brilliant really really cool feature we've been craving that for a long long time so that's really really awesome right another feature is you can control the loop point on a loop now you can change it so hopefully i can remember how to do this one properly so let's go into something [Music] so let's set this to loop and now when you're going to start and you can see there's l s and e so l at the top left i hope you can see that that's telling you where the loop point is so basically what you have to do is go inside of start and end and then when a sample is playing you can hold that you can hit loop and then you can use ctrl 3 to control when that loops so what that'll do is it'll play from the start to the end and then when it comes around to loop it will play from the loop point so hopefully this makes sense i'll show you now [Music] really really cool and then you can just move that around to wherever you want and put that back to the start if you wanted to start from the start but that just means we can get the loops super slick now and also we've got all the trimming and everything as well so we're going to be able to get samples working so much better on this it's not going to be guess work anymore especially being able to see the waveforms as well another feature which i can't actually remember how to do off the top of my head but you can now copy and paste all pads from one bank into another directly so it's a simple key command i can't exactly remember how to do it but yeah basically that's a feature that's there you can select the pad and on the screen it will say which bank do you want to move all these samples to or do you want to copy them to sorry it chooses them all you select it you press enter and it does it another great feature which will definitely be useful uh at some point when you're making beats i'm sure okay the last thing i wanted to talk about is dj mode now this is something again that i need to spend a little bit more time doing it as well and to access this you press both of these buttons together and you can see here at the top it says channel one and channel two and these are basically you've got like effects that you can apply to whatever samples you've got assigned to channel one and channel two you can fade them in and out using the dials i don't know if you can see the screen here they've got faders so you can fade in and out you can do little tricks like bend the samples you can change the bpm you can increase and decrease the bpm so basically everything you can see on these buttons these little sort of tool tips in the bottom left-hand corner they're for dj mode and they're things you can do with it so you can sync with it you can skip back and you can see it's the same on both sides because you can do that to channel one and then you can do it to channel two as well fade between the two it's really crazy i don't know how much it will get used for me to be honest uh i don't see why you'd only ever wanna mix between two uh channels but it's a super interesting feature and obviously i'll i'll look at these things in more detail further down the line so maybe there is some sort of practical usage for it we can explore that later day but basically yeah that's another insane feature that that's that they've built in this uh this dj effects mode and one other thing that i wanted to mention as well is that you can export projects so you can export projects onto the sd card if you want to use them on another sp 404 mark ii so if someone else has got one you want to take some projects around and show them you can save them to your sd card you can take those projects and you can plug them into another sp and play them out of that another brilliant feature i think and that makes it like a super sociable unit to use so it's just in the utility area again uh do you want to quit dj mode sorry yes so we go to shift utility and there we go we've got the import we've got export format the sd card so yeah you can export your projects take them to another device and use them on there again i'll show you guys all these things in more detail at a later date but that's another very very interesting feature and it's something i'll look forward to exploring in a bit more detail so i've gone through a lot of stuff there guys thank you very much for watching this video if you stuck around thank you hugely to roland for setting up with this product and i hope this video has been to your taste guys i'm super hyped about this product i've tried to cover as much as i can there and i think there's some insane features that are available and obviously like i've mentioned a couple of times in this video i'm going to be covering these in much more detail in the future so stick around become a subscriber and you can learn way way more about this device but for now i think that's quite a detailed whistle stop tour of what's going on with this new device there are more features than i've mentioned bpm sync there's all sorts of other things going on guys i will get to them i will cover them but all in good time otherwise this this video would have ended up being about three or four hours long so uh so yeah that's it for now i hope you enjoyed watching i hope this video has been fun to watch as well please stick a thumbs up on it and yeah like i mentioned don't forget to subscribe because there's going to be more content coming about this and obviously all my other samplers that i've got as well see you all soon for the next video guys keep making beats and i will be back with another upload in the next few days peace [Music] you

Channel: spvidz

Views: 35,954

Rating: 4.9371071 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: ELj1s43bEoc

Length: 32min 36sec (1956 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ohphono]

Wot is up guys

[u/psych_rheum]

That guy is the best and this thing looks perfect and a half. I'm a little bummed that it's regular batteries since I've failed to get rechargeables capable of powering my OG 404 the one time I tried but that's just a small thing and definitely solvable with a little effort. They made such cool choices in every way. Mad, mad props to Roland!

[u/Upr1ght]

It’s definitely a good video but I think Bobeats video was better…well for sure more informative