Pioneer Toraiz SP-16

The Lounge Other Gear
#706

Spinscott’s done a couple of rounds on the DJS-1000 more recently. Seems to like the layout for scene switching more than the SP-16 but that’s only my observation and his is a special case (extraordinary finger drumming for live d’n’b).

Comparing his performance of “Murder” on both instruments, the DJS sounds fuller (to use a vague term) but that could just be a mixture of variable YT audio rendering and my confirmation bias as DJS owner.

As far as the SP-16 is concerned, I simply wish PioneerDJ would do the last few things (on-board sample deletion, FFS) to round out the instrument but I think it’s going to take a DSI Tempest-like effort to encourage / shame them into it. (Perhaps we can convince JohnTheSavage to pick one up :sweat_smile:). Although, as a DJS owner, if they enable FX2 I’ll step quietly back back into my cave.

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#707

I think the difference there would be that the Tempest never quite finished features DSI had advertised and even printed in the manual, while they (or the specific dev) kept implementing other stuff we didn’t really need, such as a monophonic midi sequencer for example.

It was close to false advertising for awhile, as far as the Tempest goes. I think the SP-16 does everything Pioneer said it would, in manuals, ads or otherwise. What we’d like it to do beyond that, is something else and still relevant. But not comparable to the Tempest affair.

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#708

Pio are just something else re supporting their production machines sadly. But then you buy these things for what they are now not what they can become…

I wrestled with a djs or sp for a longtime . Went djs in the end after watching this! https://youtu.be/d5b3CiR097c

I also use a XDJ sync’d via the pro dj link cable alongside it as a stem player for pre made loops i have made either in Live or the DJS. I’m using this for a live set I’m building up.

You can also have a lot of fun just with a turntable and the DJS creating a beat from records , amazing how creative you can get real fast.

The pitch slider on the djs is a great creative tool tool for live jamming. Would be even better if they’d stuck the DS filter in damn it!

It’s not cheap but lovely quality and sounds beautiful . I’m keen to get into some freaky pedals to add in next , any recommendations ?

Great refresh of the thread everyone I’ve been amazed this hasn’t had much love before

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#709

As far as pedals go, I’m into Chase Bliss stuff right now. Blooper or Mood for texture and atmosphere, Tonal Recall for old school, dust and grain delay. The way the SP-16 is wired, I can resample live thru hardware into the Toraiz and get results I can use at once. Lovely stuff.

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#710

Seriously jonesing for some chase bliss pedals . Like the sound of that tone recall, will check it out, cheers .

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#711

Nice tip to run samples out of the analog outs through pedals back into the SP16 for resampling. Basically that means that, with the help of a small mixer, I could have three stereo fx loops going out of the SP16, each loop addressable per sample? Noice.

I’ve been messing around with the Live Looping feature for the past few hours and it’s quite fantastic. live loop something, play it back immediately, or slice it on the fly and jam out with the slices, or play it chromatically right away, add FX easily… I know other boxes can do this too, but the immediacy of the SP16 is quite something and makes this special and exciting to me. It’s sort of the missing piece I’ve been looking for in my setup, at least it feels like it at the moment :joy:

It’s funny, I can observe something in me that wants to dislike the box and find flaws given Pioneer’s track record with its user base and the many complaints I’ve read about the SP16 over the years…Plus, something wants to nag “see, it really can’t do that much”…but at least in its latest iteration with firmware 1.60, it actually does A LOT, and it does it well with a really quite decent user interface that makes jamming out easy. So I am really enjoying it and getting increasingly excited about having bought it…and I’m almost surprised about that! Lol

What is more, I’m rediscovering that to me, usability and focused purpose top long feature lists and a this-can-do-everything-you’ll-ever-need-approach any day.

Featuritis is a wicked condition, thanks to the SP16 I can see the light lol…may this help me to take a step in the right direction and free myself from this condition and its driving assumption that “more features = better device” … :palms_up_together::pray::fist:

#712

I‘m on that route as well

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#713

I think the SP-16 got a bad rep early on because it was a bit feature light, to the point of being quite limited for the price, however the last two major updates which added the quick capture mode and dual fx respectively opened up quite a lot of creative potential.

Even though I sold mine, I still think it is a decent box, like most things there are workarounds to some but not all of the limitations, and some of the features are really nice and well implemented, I think it is a great box for knocking up some 4/4 club tracks, it has pretty much everything needed.

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#714

Not to mention the price came down significantly. Didn’t it used to be like $1200 US or something like that. It’s $899 US now with more features…

edit: a couple more feature

#715

Ok, after all the praise, here three to me noticeable downsides I can identify:

  • Mutes on audio/track level (ie when a sequence is muted, the sample is also muted)

  • No motion sequencing for any parameters other than via the touch strip

  • No undo function whatsoever…this one is the only one that gives me real pause at moments when I try something I don’t like or do something accidentally.

Three minor gripes (but could also be user error at this point):

  • can’t seem to specifically choose which audio in (1 or 2) to sample from, only “Line In” or “Resample”. Basically the machine decides whether to sample in mono or stereo. So I can’t have eg one mono synth going into audio input 1 and another going into audio input 2. Fine for me ‘cause I use a mixer to send signals to my samplers via aux sends, but just pointing it out for anyone who’s interested.

  • it seems that if I’m sampling into the track (NOT live sampling/looping, but rather open track, choose “sample/edit” then record), I HAVE to save the file first before I can use it. If I leave the sampling screen without saving the sample to file, it seems to get discarded. Now given that live sampling works flawlessly without having to save the file first, this seems to be a workflow choice by Pioneer. It takes away a little bit of the immediacy when sampling into a track.

  • no gain adjustments on a sample possible. Not a big deal, I can use the mixer to turn down the volume on a track (and track = sample), but I’m used to messing with the clip/sample gain on my other samplers when a sample is significantly louder/hotter than the others.

I can see why people who bought the SP16 upon release and at full price would frustrate with the (very) slow customer after care / updates. Many of the issues seem to be design oversights or poor initial UI choices, and the fact that things did get sorted over time does show that there is some awareness at Pioneer about these things.

For me, coming to the game late, I get to enjoy a fairly patched up machine where the remaining quirks are entirely manageable…but I imagine if someone’s been through the whole process since release, the frustration and the feeling of “if only these small things could get sorted, then this thing would be perfect” will probably have eradicated any goodwill down the line.

My point: I’m really enjoying this thing and don’t mind the - to me - minor quirks, but I do understand if someone who’s been around since day 1 felt passionate about Pioneer’s failures. In a way, that’s how I feel about Akai and the MPC Live lol.

#716

There is an undo, it is Shift + Record. It may only be for after you record something in with the pads, but it is there if you are not happy with what you just played.

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#717

Awesome, thank you!

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#718

hmmm

#719

I’m on a big chase bliss pedal high too! I have the mood blooper and thermae. Was thinking of getting a tonal recall one day, do you have the blue or red knob version?

Heavily debating bitterly spending the fortune and getting a gen loss second hand.

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#720

On a Side Note…SP-16 keeps popping up now for around 700 - 800ish.

#721

yeah I got mine for 600€, brilliant stuff for that money!

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#722

I’m on the red knob version, but as lovely as it is, this one’s clearly more for guitar players (go figure, it’s a pedal after all). It has a very nice texture and some cool modulation, but synth heads aren’t usually lacking for delays, so if you got a few kits already, it’s not unlikely this one won’t add all that much. It’s noway near as clever as the Mood or the Blooper, but it doesn’t say it is either - it’s a delay, plain and simple, with lovely texture. But as I said, chances are you might have other ways already to reach a delay texture you already like.

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#723

I agree with the idea that those of us who arrived late to the Toraiz party, aren’t colored by its introduction and roadmap to now. To say today that it’s lacking in features is a bit absurd. But it’s a legacy statement which I can relate to, being early on the Tempest and sticking with it for years.

But today, it can’t be about anything else than if it has features important to you or not, not that it’s lacking. It really is not lacking.

I’m getting more and more that the Toraiz is everything I loved about the MPC workflow, and everything I didn’t love about it removed. There’s not much left compared to what a Live or One can do, but what’s there is enough to make amazing stuff. I’ll take flow and output quality any day over Akai’s current offering.

Also, I got the Toraiz dirt cheap, compared to its launch price. That helps, too. Over here, it’s priced in the same range as the MC-707, slightly above the TR-8S and the Digitakt but substantially cheaper than the Octatrack.

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#724

Ok, to not song an unbiased praise, here are a few things I don’t think it’s doing all that well, that would be reasonable to expect given its position -

Midi polyphony - I’d be okay if it had none, and was a monophonic midi sequencer. But it’s not. It just doesn’t record polyphony. It records the base note and then you need to program additional notes (up to four per step) for a chord. Either do this proper or not at all. Maybe recording from a keyboard solves this. Haven’t tried that yet.

Silence tracks - if you got a track looping across patterns, there’s no way to silence it from the sequencer. You can do it live (shift + track) but if you got arrangements where a loop sort of runs its own life across patterns and then want to cut it from the sequencer, I can’t find a way to do this.
EDIT: I recalled a little trick from the Rytm, which had the same thing. I slap on a new trig but parameter lock it to output zero. It’s ugly but it works :slight_smile:

Delete track from anywhere - I can’t find a short cut to delete a track on the spot. If you’re in the track edit view, you can still jam away and delete it from there, but a short cut to just wipe it would speed up the workflow.

Preview sample - this one confuses me. I can’t preview a recorded sample until it’s saved and assigned. Trimming and such is more or less pointless since I can’t hear what I’m doing. If the above points are kind of sloppy, this is my only WTF moment so far.

Reverb on master only - as far as I can tell, at least :slight_smile:

No ping pong on the delay - given the general quality of the fx, I wonder why this fairly common delay feature (especially among them funky DJ people) was left out.

None of this comes even close to me considering not keeping this baby. If Pioneer added nothing more to the Toraiz, it would still be great to me.

And I kind of think it does p-locks better than Elektron.

runs for bomb shelter cover which I built five years ago, knowing I would one day say this and accept the consequences

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#725

oh man I would love to get one of those gen loss I’ve got a friend who gets some insane sounds of it