Dope. I love the simplicity of that setup. I have never owned an SP and even though I’m mainly ITB these days, part of me wants to pick up a used SP-404 for simple beatmaking on the couch or remixes of projects I make on the computer.
It’s also strange, but I miss the little Boss Micro BR-80 recorder I used for my Digitakt projects. It’s so not designed for electronic music and has loads of features I never used, but the mixes sounded great with almost no tweaking and it’s so tiny. Mixing on the DAW is complex and time consuming process. With the BR-80, it was literally just a matter of making sure the levels were good and making a few tweaks to the mastering algorithm, but mostly a 10 to 15 minute process for recording, mixing, mastering.
For some reason when working with the sp404 (I always use the resample method) I kind of get into a zen-mode where I forget what I’m doing, and make music purely on intuition, it’s hard to explain.
Its a machine thats not suited for making ‘serious’ music, or producing something you planned, because it will always end up like something completely different, in a good or a bad way. Its kind of the anti-digitakt in a way, in that you cant finetune anything. Both are awesome in their own way though.
AR2 seems to me (apart from the pads maybe) ideal for hip hop / boom bap. Easy fast sampling & resampling, analogue filters, saturation/drive/comp etc.
This time I started messing with the dual vco’s to make synthy lead sounds over this lofi instrumental. Works well, though the tracking is off sometimes.
Great work mate.
