I notice that it’s really hard on my SP to get to some specific tempo values. I have these chops that seem to work best at 88. 88 is such a value. Now I want to set it as the tempo for recording samples and I can’t land on it.
Did you notice something like that? And is there any way to set the tempo otherwise than with the first knob?
I guess the range 40 to 200 is a bit much for the knob…
Ah actually with SHIFT for fine tempo I got there. For sequence tempo though, it’s been a pain but yesterday I managed after many attempts (there are no decimal point tempo as far as I can tell, for sequences)
If you work this out please post here! I’ve been going mad trying to get Live and my SP to play nice over USB midi. Getting the SPs patterns to sync with Live is a nightmare for me, let alone recording midi from Live into a pattern on the SP
Made few more tests, I wasn’t able to record a clean pattern. (tested USB C midi and physical Midi input thru E-RM Multiclock)
Sequencing the SP404 from live using USB C midi out, is quite sloppy, timing is inconsistent, not usable.
Sequencing with Midi cable (thru E-RM Multiclock) seems rock solid.I don’t know if it depends on the Multiclock.
I use USB C connected to a (good quality) USB C Hub, I don’t know if the sloppiness depends on the HUB.
Thanks for this. I’m going straight in via USB-C (don’t have the right midi cable to test that) and things are sloppy so I very much doubt it’s your hub.
Using the External Instrument and triggering the SP sounds isn’t ‘that’ bad for me. Although I’m finding when I adjust the hardware latency in the External Instrument plugin to tighten things up to say, get a kick hitting on the one, it works for a bit, then it seems completely randomly the kick goes ahead of the beat. Not by loads, but it’s happening. It also seems I need different values on the hardware latency every time I try the test.
Playing back pattens from the SP in sync, adjusting the MIDI clock sync delay in Live’s prefs seems to be what’s causing the first beat out of time. You can see on the SP the BPM massively fluctuates for a moment before settling at the correct tempo. Without adjusting the clock sync delay patterns are waaaay off though.
I also noticed chancing MIDI Sync from Auto to USB on the SP makes things go wild, and it starts playing patterns by itself and skipping about.
I gave up and made beats just on the SP in the end yesterday. But it wou’d be good to have the option of using it properly with Live. I also have an SP-16 and the goal is to sequence the 404 with that eventually. I was hoping to connect them both via USB and into my laptop and have Live in the middle but maybe that’s a bad idea…
I don’t think so. Ableton midi jitter is almost unnoticeable, in this case it is evident and unusable (10-20ms jitter).
I have several synths clocked by ableton live and they are just perfect (1-3ms jittering).
Ok, I was messing around with some guitar and the 404 again tonight for the first time in a while.
The first time I recorded guitar, I resampled a pattern and then recorded the guitar over it in resample mode.
I’m not sure if it’s spelled out in the manual and it’s not intuitive, but if you want to record guitar by itself to a pad while a pattern (not a sample) is playing and watching the pattern beat counter, it is possible.
While you are in pattern mode, go to external source, setup your guitar amp, go to record setting and make sure it’s set to external in, instead of mix. Then start your pattern and play over it, even let it loop back around once if you need time to get ready, but make sure you start on the bar of the pattern you want to play over. I can’t remember the exact button combination at this point but once you are done, you should be able to go into skipback mode and the recording of just the guitar will be there. If you had let the pattern play around once to get ready, you’ll now have to trim off the beginning (which is why it’s important to start playing on the bar and not noodle around first). Then you just assign that to a pad, and you should have your guitar by itself now ready to be added to your pattern or resampled. I need to experiment more, but even when I had input set to Bus 1 in effects settings, the recorded sound was still dry, so you’ll also need to add your effects back.
If there is an easier way than this, please let me know, but at least it’s possible to play over a pattern without having to first resample the pattern to a pad as I was doing. You can also drop that guitar sample in wherever you want in the pattern when you are done, which is nice, so you could theoretically do loads of overdubs, and since you are working in pattern mode, you have undos and don’t have to commit as you do in resample mode.
I just tried and for me it works to press Resample while Pattern mode is ON, make sure the Routing is set to Ext In, select a pad for the recording, and then the recording starts when I start a pattern.
That results in my external input being recorded while a pattern is playing. No need to use Skip Back.
Ah, I thought I tried this and it didn’t work, but maybe I hit record by mistake instead of resample. I’m not at my SP now, can you still see the pattern bar count when you do it that way (or does it just say record)?
Ah, OK. Sorry still away from my SP, but I think there may still be an advantage for some people to do it the way I described above.
Someone had complained earlier about it being difficult to grab your instrument when using resample as you have to hit the pattern button to start recording.
If you use the skipback mode, you have the advantage of being able to watch the pattern bar counter.
For instance, I had an 8-bar drum pattern and wanted to record an 8-bar guitar part. With the method above you can wait for the drums to loop around (8-1, 8-2, 8-3,8-4), and then start right on the first beat, and also keep track of where you are in the 8 bars as you play. Then you just have to trim off the extra bit at the beginning when you are done, but as long as you started on the first beat and ended on the last bar, it’s easy to grab your guitar part from the Skip Back mode, and know the length matches the 8-bars (ie, not having to trim the end).
With the resample method, it not only starts recording right away since there is no count in, if I’m remembering correctly, it also doesn’t show you the pattern counter (and just shows record, as you said), so you have to keep track of the pattern length by ear, and if you don’t get it right, the sample you have recorded won’t match the length of the pattern, which makes the recording and trimming process a bit more complicated.
Watching the bar count is also helpful for planning and recording overdubs to drop into certain parts of the pattern later.
For (somewhat) perfect loops I sample a little bit of the next bar or play in a little bit of the next bar. Then I truncate at the hit of the 1 of that last bar. It’s not perfect but it works decent enough. I haven’t worked out how to use the new end snap function yet and it seems that that one can only be applied when sampling, not after the fact.
When in Start/End mode, I often want to zoom in on the End point without moving the dial first. Not sure if there’s an “official” way to do it, but I worked out that if I turn on loop, then turn C2 (loop point), I can basically move the loop point close to the End point and then zoom in around there. Saves me a lot of time when coming back to a sample to fine tune its end point.
EDIT: and here’s the more elegant solution to point 2, just use the mark button! thanks @Sleepynumb
Okay, sorry if this has been covered or is in an obvious place in the manual but I have searched all over the place (including the manual) and can’t figure it out. Is there a way to specify when recording external audio whether it is mono or stereo? In this video he states that the sp recognizes whether it is mono or stereo based on the input(s) you are using. He says this at about 28 minutes in. However, when I hold remain on a sample it says stereo when I know it was recorded using just one input (so theoretically it would detect it as mono). I’m kind of baffled.
Cool. Thank you. I did see that when flipping through the manual but if you can’t change it before recording doesn’t that affect how much storage space and possibly polyphony you have if everything is recorded as a stereo sample by default?
I’d like further confirmation, but everything I’ve heard online seems to indicate that the polyphony and sample time quoted is all stereo not mono. If that’s the case, both are very good.
Is it strange to anyone else that Bus 1 and 2 return to the default parameters (bypass) after you have turned the machine off. I keep having to remember my settings and reapply them when I am working on specific patterns. It would be cool if you could save bus 1 and 2 effects along with the bus 3 and 4 in favorites. I’m not quite sure of the logic behind this.
You kind of have to rethink effects when building a beat I think, at least that’s what I’ve found. Instead of leaving effects 1 and 2 on, for any effects I want to keep, I’ve had to bake them in as I go. After that I use the “remain” button to toggle effects off for those so as not to double up effects. I only use 3 & 4 for applying effects to everything as glue later on. Also, once my beat is assembled I use 1 & 2 as performance effects, which you couldn’t do unless you baked your samples in along the way.
I kind of think of the workflow on the SP as equivalent to the old Choose Your Own Adventure series of kids books I had growing up. The choices you make will definitely affect the outcome later. That’s why I was saying in another post that if I was still a smoker I probably would have gone through a couple of packs of cigarettes when making my last beat. There are so many spots where I was thinking this thing could end up trash if I make a wrong decision somewhere.
As others have said though, this sort of adds to the “charm” of the device. You sacrifice micromanagement, but what you get in return is something that you never would have made anywhere else.
One thing I would like though is a way to resample in place in bulk so that you could have a stock kit and then bake effects into the whole kit when you find it sounds like you like it. As far as I can tell now, you have to resample each individual pad, unless I’m missing something.
Resample in bulk would be awesome! I also think it would be cool if you could have resample just overwrite on the same pad that you are sampling from. this could be dangerous though.
Yeah, the micromanagement aspect is something I’m trying to let go of. Coming from the Digitakt, it is a very different instrument philosophically. The other aspect that is hard to wrap my head around is that with all that resampling it gets messy really fast. I am already thinking of strategies that certain sounds go on certain banks, etc. But so much of my process these days is playing instruments into the sp which is kind of a frenetic process where I’m not always paying much attention where I am saving something. The sp strangely requires a lot more forethought.
I think you mentioned somewhere copying projects with your main drum kits already loaded. Have you been doing this? It might be a good way for me to develop a sort of template for where sounds will generally live in a project (eg: drums in bank A, Bass lines on B, C reserved for resamples, Etc.)
