If I had money to spare I’d possibly go with the 101
1 drum track where the drums can play without choking each other ( though presumably it has choke groups ) would help , and the fx and synth sounds quite powerful to run alongside digitakt / digitone .
Scatter / audio processing seems quite straightforward too. ( though I’ll have to recheck the 101 as I don’t think it samples ,not sure if It’s got any audio in ). Fx reminded me of those in pocket operator
I doubt I’ll buy any , I’ve got rd8 on order and haven’t used much of my gear for months.
If the live looping works as stated then I’m very interested in this box, could loop 4 or 5 tracks eg off modular and have 8 variations on each plus effects etc, each with own slider and pots plus couple of drum and synth tracks and bring in some external effects on the effects send return, sounds pretty good to me. This is the kind of simple looper I’ve been waiting for.
I remember in 1996, I bought a Yamaha cs1x I think it was called, but didn’t like it and took it back to the shop, in the corner, just arrived was the new mc303, I had a quick play with it and was gobsmacked, 808, 909 drums, synths , sequencer , effects, all in one box, wow !!! It was a game changer, took one home with me and been hooked on making music ever since !!
Yeah, I was hoping they would have done an update to something the sp505. Small, portable, something with an internal drive or sd card option, quick sampling and easy looping with some decent sequencing power. Make it a similar size to this new 101, a little bigger, 6 tracks, no internal synths or anything to get in the way, battery powered, good times. And hey, if they want it to come with sounds, then they can include the standard 1gb soundpack from loopmasters.
At a session many moons ago maybe 1997, I had a mobile ProTools rig that I would rent out, can’t remember his name but this producer came in to track out stems, he had accounts with some big Ad agencies and created music for campaigns like Nike, Gatorade, Nissan, etc. Comes with. (2) boxes the: SP808 and MPC 2000 MCD only. we set him up and start recording his stems. OMG !!! What an amazing talent. He went from Hip-hop to Dub, to Electronic/Pop, Rock and Roll ( Hans Zimmer style) Cinematic orchestrations… it was crazy! He said he never hired musicians or players. All him sample-based and whatever synth he had available for melodic parts that he would play/sequence then chop up as clips to the MPC.
The point is I am sure some great talent will pop up and push this thing(MC707) to its limits with some amazing results.
But an SP-808 reissue ? yeah that gets a
Do you think there will still be a place for the sp-404? People love those to death, quirks and all. But I wonder if these will kill off interest in those? Maybe they have nothing to do with each other.
The 404 will still have its place as a portable sampler. The 101 does not sample, but you can load samples into it from your computer. The 707 can sample, but is much larger, and not battery powered. Both the 101 and 707 have much better sequencers than the 404, and have built in synth engines. So yeah, I think the 404 will have its place, although it would be nice if Roland would have updated it, instead of just giving it the Aira paint job. My gripe with the 404 is that you can’t record from an external source, while playing other samples internally. You could do this on the 303, but why they cut it out for the 404 is beyond me. I would have used it way more if it had this feature.
It’s basic and it’s not. You can’t do much in terms of editing what’s there. But as for putting together more complex patterns and launch them in and out, it does things not many sequencers do.
You’d have to reach for a Pyramid or Cirklon, to find a sequencer that can launch sixteen patterns at once, all of them playing any number of samples from the sample bank (but not more than sixteen in this case, because of the Blackbox’s limitations in sample slots), and each pattern can run its own time signature, duty cycle and number of steps.
All of this while still being able to launch clips live, as well as mix single patterns with ongoing scenes with collection of patterns.
In that respect, it’s ahead of much of what’s out there.
Plus BB samples, in multiple paradigms including very long recording, clips, granular, timestretch and slicing, uses an sd card, and has multiple outs. Fulfills far more requirements for some users. Works pretty well already with an external sequencer and the onboard one is fine for basic piano roll/pad sequencing. Makes a super sidekick to any elektron; including OT and DT as a workflow/massive SD library resampler and mangler-workflow component.
Standalone it works well as a palmsized ableton if you want to work on building a 16 slot sampleset of clips etc from all four corners of a multi hundred onboard GB library.
Yeah, that whole 8 bar limit on loops for the Roland (if I got that part right), is a real buzz killer. Doesn’t really warrant an Ableton comparison in that respect, though I get the analogy with clip launching, scenes and stuff. But in the Blackbox, I can combine a 128 bar loop with a five step sequence (and sometimes do), and I don’t see myself falling back on something less, in that regard. Even the Elektron can pull off similar epics with different time signatures per track and conditional trigs.
