I have a lot of hardware samplers:
- Roland SP-404MKII
- Polyend Tracker
- Elektron Digitakt
- Elektron Octatrack
- Teenage Engineering PO-33
- Teenage Engineer EP-133
- Bastl Microgranny
- Korg Electribe ES-1 (my very first!)
Do I need all of these? Of course not. In fact, as many people on the internet like to point out, most of the sampling, sequencing, and effects on hardware can be done much better in the box in a DAW with some good plugins.
So, why do I have so many? A couple reasons. First, music hardware completely changed how I produce. It didn’t make me better (I still am upper-tier mediocre at best). But, with hardware, I started having a lot more fun with this hobby. It’s more tactile (even compared to control surfaces I have used), it’s more immediate, and even compared to a laptop, I consider it more portable.
The second reason that I have so many different devices is something that I have trouble articulating in a concise manner. So, I’ll steal a phrase that I think is useful.
The Medium is the Message
I won’t summarize it here. Wikipedia can do that for you.
What I am stealing/using/misinterpreting(?) from that phrase is the idea of the importance of the medium itself in communicating the message.
Here we have samplers. Each of them can record or load a sound and then play it back. Most of the ones that I own contain a sequencer and effects. They are all kind of the same, right?
And yet, I find myself inspired in different ways with each of these devices.
This post is about the Roland SP-404MKII. Not my first sampler, not my most recent, not even necessarily my favorite. But, I was using it the other day, so I thought I would start this conversation with it.
The SP-404MKII…gods, can we just call it the 404 for the rest of this post and all agree on what we are talking about? Ok, good.
The 404 is an amazing box for quickly recording long stereo samples. Each pad can hold about 16 minutes of stereo audio. Each project has 10 banks of 16 pads. It’s a lot of sample memory.
On top of that, the 404 has a lot of really nice-sounding effects. Pads can be resampled using those effects over and over, creating fun mangled sounds.
It also has a sequencer…that I hate. Lots of people love it. I’m not making an objective statement here. But I hate it. Step sequencing on it is no fun. Real time finger drumming of the patterns is…I don’t know what I don’t like about it. It’s just not for me. I like to sit and stare at sequences (we can talk about my love of that with the Polyend Tracker someday).
But, the other day, I thought I’d give the sequencer another go.
I took a couple passes and made this pattern using some samples from another drum machine and another melodic bit that I chopped up.
I made this…
I really don’t like the beat here. It sounds silly to me. But there is something about the melodic loop that I dug. So, I muted out the drums to get this….
I like that a lot more. And this is where the 404 is really fun for me. I started playing around with effects. I reversed the part. I pitched it up, resampled it, and pitched it back down. I took a couple different resampled versions of the loop, panned them a little, and made this…
This is more my speed. And, it illustrates what I love about the 404. I did all of this resampling quickly. I could leave this loop as it is, an expression of a chill night of messing around. I could also sample it into something else for further mangling and sequencing. No matter what, though, I had fun with it.
The SP-404MKII, for all its sequencing imperfections, is fun and drives me to mangle samples in ways that my other devices don’t.
The medium is the message, and the message here is mangling.
What do you think about the SP-404MKII? Does it inspire anything specific for you?
