Sampling first became popular back in the 1980’s with the invention of the Fairlight and later the Synclavier, the LinnDrum was also the first drum machine of that era to produce realistic high quality drum samples. Back then samplers were expensive and only available to the upper echelons of the music industry and sampling itself was deemed to be a black art …
Twenty years later and all that has now changed, compared to the thousands that you’d have to pay back then Samplers are now “cheap as chips” to coin a popular phrase. The falling cost of memory and the increasing quality and speed of processors also means that the quality of samples has improved dramatically.
In the 1990’s rack samplers were common place and became affordable and were gradually used by DJ’s and incorporated into the re-mix mentality. Roland obviously spotted an opportunity within this initially niche but now mainstream market for a “Phrase” or “Loop” sampler which effectively brings us to the Roland SP404.
The 404 is the successor to the previous model – the 303, and has an increased number of voices, more trigger pads and a larger amount of memory. It is primarily used – as the name suggests – to sample phrases or loops of music/drum beats and to aid this facility it has an on-board microphone.
The SP404 is essentially a silver desk-top type box with 12 trigger sensitive sample pads and a whole host of parameters to edit, amend and process the sampled sound. There are up to 29 effects that can be chosen and this unit has 2 sampling modes – one for “Hi-Fi” quality samples and the other “Lo-Fi” which seems to meet the requirement at the moment for grainy, distorted samples.
It also has real-time pattern recording for creating sample loops and comes with software that allows the editing and modification of the samples created. It also comes equipped with a Compact Flash slot for storing samples onto although the Compact Flash card is not included with the 404 and will need to be purchased separately. However this is a good medium for transferring samples from machine to machine and is obviously small enough to fit into a pocket or gig bag compartment. It will accommodate cards up to 1Gb and is compatible with .WAV and AIFF files ….