I have a 1 minute sample of music assigned to a sample pad and I want to stop it playing after 30 secs. How?
pressing stop works for patterns but not samples.
pressing the assigned pad once again restarts the sample.
gating the sample would mean I have to hold the sample button down for 30 secs.
Is there a simple method I've missed?
(sp-404)


doverst (newbie)

yo man, you should really read the whole manual. Everything is clearly shown there even with images.
hit the pad you want, turn gate off, turn loop on.
Now when u hit your pad it will start playing and when u hit it once again it will stop.

ps. read the whole manual

thanks for the quick reply.
I'm assuming once loop is set for that sample pad, That pad will always loop when pressed, so a 3/4 key sequence becomes a 1 key on off

or if you want that sample to always play for those 30 seconds... get your 404 manual and read up about the MARK button, and setting start and end points.

It's described on p.29 of the manual: press LOOP while the sample is playing, press the pad to stop it, than disable LOOP if needed. Alternatively you can use GATE, works like LOOP at this point..

Hold MARK and hit the pad. Hit MARK where you want it to stop. You can hold DEL and press MARK to truncate(to cut the part you're not hearing anymore away) if you want.

Don't do this unless you're low on memory.

Everything you need to know is in the manual.

I've discovered a quirk... If you press Cancel rapidly about 4 or 5 times this stops a sample playing... strange, and useful...?

3 times, to be exact.
It can helped when a sample's really long, and you want to turn it off quick.

Holy crap! I never knew you could do that. Useful, because I like using lots of long samples.

i use the cancel trick on long samples with gnarly delay to make drones and such i really dig and if you have two samplers you can run your drums on another sampler, and have delay set to all samples then cancel out all samples and play with the timing of the delay trail to create volume swells or space echo goodness

I tend to disagree here. Switching off the mark button will delete the start and end points previously set. So if it's about saving the original entire sample, you're better of making a couple of imports instead and then go about truncating.

To be honest I haven't quite found a fast way to divide a sample into a few smaller chunks when you're dealing with minutes long samples... anyone got any hints?

Resample? You know you can just select the start point with the mark button. Then the next time you play the sample you hit mark after hitting the pad, then select a new start point.
I hope that helps

Yeah, I do that, but then next time I want to sample something that comes after what I 'chopped' already using resampling. Then I need to listen to the whole sample until that point. It takes a lot of time to chop a 3 minute song into 10 pieces if you want to have each sample of equal length.

I also would have thought Roland would have implemented a full dial style marking method. Now you need to be very close using the mark button and then you can only do small adjustments with the two knobs. With bigger samples that's a serious issue if, like me my timing to get on beat drums marked is terrible. (for that you need to be off beat with the mark button, never really gotten used to that back with the SP-555 either).

Yeah, I see what you mean.
Only thing I could recommend is just recording single stuff at the time.
Like listen to the record, mark the part you think you can do something with, then record those parts.