Roland SP-404MKII 4.04 Update: Explosive Possibilities That Change Everything

How would you integrate the performance possibilities of the version 4.04 update into your setup? Tell us in the comments below, and drop by Sweetwater for an in-depth look at the exciting features in the Roland SP-404MKII 4.04 update 👉 sweetwater.sjv.io/Roland_SP-404MKII_4.04_Update

This is an exceptional example of a company designing a product with the customers in mind. Very cool. Good job Roland's product team!

I requested the loop feature and they added it Wow! Thanks Roland!

Y’all need to put Dustin on the thumbnail because anybody with Roland gear from the past 5 years knows he’s often the only person doing product demos who is competent and actually knows what he’s talking about. For a few of the boutiques he’s literally got the only decent overview that isn’t just scrolling through patches.

thanks! The fact that they added midi cc's for the looper is brilliant! (imagine that, roland doing something well with midi implementation!)

I thought that the 404 was already strong on the performance side, but had some gaps in the toolkit for composition. This update helps a lot with that. The Loop Capture and sample measure length features that you demo nicely are great for making the process of creating meaningful musical phrases as samples. I think the pattern edit functions are useful too - they mean you can be a bit more experimental when you record a pattern, because you can now make changes and corrections afterwards. There's still a bit of a disconnection between creating samples and performing with them though, because you can't create a sample and have it immediately play back - that would be true live looping. It's a shame that you still have to split the creative process into two parts: creating samples and patterns as one part, then performing them as another. It's still not quite seamless enough to be able to create improvised sampled music in a truly "live" way, which would be my ultimate musician's tool - a free-form recording device which can capture and manipulate my playing in real time. That's more than a looper, which can't relaunch the recordings with different timings, and more than a groovebox, which makes you structure the music into a limited number of tracks or parts. It's also not a DAW, which is a blank canvas that you need to configure before you can start creating music, and that means making decisions about what's going to go where, before you even start, which means you're being steered by the DAW's design and structure, rather than your musical intent.

Happy 404Day. Roland 4Life🧡

been asking for a simple tone generator forever. awesome.

This is an amazing update! I think the only other thing that would make the SP404 one of the best affordable sampler on the marker right now is the possibility to have a band pass filter per samples like the one on the Digitakt, in order to avoid destructive filtering resampling and to be accessible like the Start/End tweaks

excellent overview and walkthrough. What a fantastic piece of kit, well done Roland!

Great update to my beloved 404 - thank you Roland!

Ordered mine this morning on the back of the new update! Excited for it to arrive tomorrow. :)

The looper is truly fantastic, especially useful for guitarists. Great demo video!

Superb features and I love the track noodle - let's have it finished and released !

Superb demo update Dustin.

I wish we could stem out the Looper takes.

this is a great update !! thanks for the video !!

I'm buying it soon.

The Sp 404 sales about to go up!

so so rad! LFG!