The Eternal Quest: Floating somewhere in the realm of Platonic Ideals is the ultimate sampling tool to realise the sounds I hear in my head. I’ve invested in a whole farm of boxes trying to find this ideal – everything from the Octatrack to the MC-707 … and like Bono still haven’t found what I’m looking for. The SP404 mk2 is not it either – but is refreshingly specific in what it isn’t.
I’ll speak harshly, then smooth the waters: the SP404 is not a musical instrument. It’s a musical arranger – It does not initiate a sound composition, but reforms it. People have composed with discs and magnetic tape for nearly a century so this is no inferiority – but if you are working in Absolute Music you will not be satisfied here.
An example – you will not loop a waveform or snippet of audio in a tight loop, create a filter envelope and score this as notes in a melodic phrase. There’s workarounds that could approach that kind of thinking but it goes against this system. You will instead grab a bit of noise from existing media, warp it through effects to become curious and then replay it in a sound montage. I work that way sometimes, and here the SP404 is dead on target. Then use other devices to do the notes. It’s not all-in-one.
☢️ This answers the inevitable ‘which is better’ question – if you would like to score notes on a mobile box you must choose the AKAI MPC, no quibbling. If you are into turntablism or cutting up tape then the simplicity of the SP404 Mk2 is a great asset. ☢️
Ignore an unfortunate connection with a musical style of “morose jazz samples with hip hop beats sugar coated with fake vinyl shit”. Keep in mind that monkeys also buy Jupiter 8 clones to play Hits Of The Eighties – it’s not the machine’s fault.
SOME GOOD SHIT
The Internet is filled with people talking about the SP404, so I don’t need to state the basics. Here’s a sensible review. (NB. this is for the original software which has been updated).
It’s small, it’s light. It’s something to throw in your backpack. Lugging the MPC around the planet wasn’t too bad but this should be easy. Being Roland it runs on batteries, (surely Roland has shares in a company that makes AA batteries). Not built like a brick shit house but looks like it will degrade gracefully. Put skate stickers on it. Paint it with nail polish.
I intend to perform with it alongside the MPC, which needs time every now and then to load sounds from the hard drive. The 404 has 16 ‘projects’ in it at any time, which are made up of ‘banks’ of ‘patterns’ in Ableton style. Importantly it moves smoothly to the next ‘song’ when playing. There’s also a DJ mode with A/B fading and so on, which again could keep the set going while the MPC loads. So it’s able to perform a continuous live set from RAM. Very good.
Much of your composition is done by bouncing. You have a sound on virtual tape one, you perform it and effect it and bounce it over to tape two. Very much like two cassette decks and a Radio Shack effects unit (hello my 1970’s recordings). If you miss something cool relax – the last 25 seconds are always being recorded. This simplicity should bring experimentation and serendipity. As a teen I’d just throw anything at a tape recorder and loop it until it (kind of) went with what was already there. The gaps and faults are part of the texture.
There’s an awful lot of effects to play with. Six at a time are available on the front panel of the box and can be swapped. Getting to the 30+ others take a bit of knob twiddling. Strangely the FX are not saved per project – every project has the same ‘external’ effect unit available.
A small but efficient software tool allows drag and drop to the unit. Got a WAV on the hard drive? Just drag it to the pad on screen and there it is. Muck with it, send it back.
SOME STUPID SHIT
So far as I have been able to test there’s a major stupidity in the way the SP404 imports samples. There’s a common method to store a sample loop in an WAV or AIFF that you can set and expect in multiple DAWs and software samplers. The SP ignores this data and requires you to do it all over again on a smaller screen – and good luck getting rid of the click. Fuck that. Other samplers are better than this.
This seemingly comes from an expectation that most ‘loops’ will be created by the pattern – it’ll be re-triggered. Yeah… but no. There’s a separate loop point for a reason – think of the pedal noise in a piano sample.
This removal may be because time stretching is available via Variphrase. Yep – that’s right – the same process as in the V-Synth, with same weird Backing versus Ensemble settings. It might strip all the loop data out of your WAV sample, it certainly will take any click in your sample and stretch it into an ungainly KLUNK. Back in the day the V-Synth needed a bit of time to process the sample. The SP404 seems to do it in a flash, but it still sounds like a decade ago – and offline processing might be a help.
Speaking of the V-Synth makes one a little nostalgic for Sample + Synthesis, filters, envelopes … but all that denies the simplicity of the SP404. It will never be a synthesiser. And that’s fine.