hey i'm a new dude here and i just wanna say hey to everybody. i've read through the forums and this place seems like a really interesting place...

annnyway.. i have a 404 with a 1gb flash card.. basically.. i wanna sync it up to my mpc200xl. i went through the manual and set it up to aut.

my problem is that when you trigger a pattern and then say, drop the bass drum from that pattern.. (at this point i should say that i have been recording loops on each pad which are synced up from logic) you have to drop it back in at the start of the bar, otherwise it's out of time.. is there any way to kind of force it into time so you can just drop samples in and out in time willy nilly?

also do i need to save a for each song on the mpc and then sync up patterns on the 404?

i hope you dudes can understand and that i am not doing something really stupid (i probably am)

anyway thanks in advance for any help you might be able to give..

cheers!

sequence the sounds from your mpc.

thanks pt3r

you see i am using loops on the 404, and i worked out how to tempo sync the mpc and the 404

the problem i am having now is that when i trigger a pattern from the mpc to the 404, it just plays the very start of the pattern and then cuts out..

also when i am recording a pattern on the 404 itself.. if i record the loops say for 2 bars (and specify the lenght of the pattern as two bars) well it does that but for some reason the 404 adds 2 bars of silence after it!

if i do a 4 bar pattern it adds 4 bars etc. etc.

do you have any idea why it might be doing this?

thanks again dude, i should be paying you a consultancy fee

cheers

Hi, I think what pt3r is saying is that it would be easier to use the mpc as a midi note sequencer and the 404 simply as a sound module - forget about midi sync and the 404's own pattern sequencer.

Personally, I go with that, the 404 sequencing is pretty limited, and it's dead end data, you can't export them as midi files for use in something else as far as I know. All your hard work programming them is locked to the 404.

But anyway...

Are the samples used in the 404 pattern set with the Gate? I wonder if you have one that's even a few milliseconds too long to fit the pattern, the 404 doesn't go and add measures. If you don't use Gate, samples play to their end and loops keep going until you trigger them again. With Gate, the sample, even if looping, will only play for the duration the note or pad was held when the pattern was recorded. Downside of Gate is that you have to keep the pad or midi key down when recording for as long as it needs to play.

So it does...
I just made a 1 bar pattern with a sample obviously too long. The 404 cut the audio of the pattern at the end of the bar and went right ahead and put a blank bar after it. Thing is, the new bar was still numbered bar 1, not 2 - odd! After this ghost bar, it played the first bar with the sample and then the ghost and so on...

So, I made sure the Sample was set to gate (it had loop too) and recorded a new pattern, 1 bar again and this time held the sample pad until the end of the bar - success, a one bar pattern!

Thinks... if you're going to use loop samples in patterns - make sure they don't run longer than the length and BPM of the pattern requires. The 404 samples don't auto fit tempo like ACID and Sonar groove clips do. I think you would have to manually adjust the time of these samples on the 404 to suit when the pattern BPM is different from the one you recorded the pattern at (faster BPM =shorter sample time needed) - Pattern BPM might well be actually different under another machines midi clock, even if the BPM readout is the same - their internal clocks are going to be a bit different.

hey seriously thanks a lot for the really informative answer.. i'm gonna go and check that shit now.. i think the gate thing will be my problem..

thanks again dudes

richie

p.s i have decided to go the other way and use my mpc for sequencing.. i'm gonna go and buy a card reader online for my 2000xl right now.. it was funny walking around dublin today trying to get that and a 16mb ram. people in shops were looking at me like i was a caveman!

Good luck with the memory!

Only a few years back I was lusting after 1Meg rams for an Atari ST. I have a bag of them somewhere now.

I reckon the 404 internal memory is nearly 16Meg. Things have come a long way.

Almost bought a Korg ESX instead of the 404. What killed it was the thought of life as an e-bay junky hunting up SM cards - and that's their current model!

Cheers
Jim

about this loop vs pattern thingy... the easiest way to get a loop working with the 404 sequencer is to turn off BOTH "loop" and "gate" modes...

say you have 1 bar pattern rollin, with a drum loop startin @ 1.1, synced with bmp :

A - If you turn on "loop" the drum loop is in "toggle" mode, so basically the first bar it will play, the second bar it will be toggled off, then it'll be toggle back "on" on the third...and so on

B - If you turn "gate" mode on, the drum loop will just play as long as you keep pressure on the pad. The problem arise when you try to press the pad during the whole bar (intending to have sound during the whole bar) : if you release the pad a little to late, you will release on the very first milliseconds of the first beat of the next bar.

so what you get when you record a 1 bar pattern is this :

(numbers are beats, dots are sixteenths)

1,1 note on (pressing the pad) . . . 1,2 . . . 1,3 . . . 1,4 . . .

1,1 note on (you just recorded) . note off (releasing the pad) . . 1,2 . . . 1,3 . . . 1,4 . . .
1,1 note on . note off . .1,2 . . . 1,3 . . . 1,4 . . .
1,1 note on . note off . .1,2 . . . 1,3 . . . 1,4 . . .
1,1 note on . note off . .1,2 . . . 1,3 . . . 1,4 . . .

you get the idea ? ...the first time the bar plays is okay : you hear the drumloop until the end
Then the second time the bar plays and you get you only get a short glitch, hardly a drumloop. What happens is the first "note off" message comes rights after the repeat of the first "note on" you recorded, resulting in the short glitch.

C. With gate and loop on, you'll get the same as with "gate" alone.

D. With both modes off, instead, the 404 is ignoring "note off" messages, so what you get is

1.1 note on (note off ignored) . . . 1.2 . . . 1.3 . . . 1.4 . . .
1.1 note on . . . 1.2 . . . 1.3 . . . 1.4 . . .
1.1 note on . . .1.2 . . . 1.3 . . . 1.4 . . .

Which I bet is a much more satisfying a result !
I don"t know if you see the irony of it all : to get a good looping, you got to forget about the "loop" button. Roland make great toys, but thhey're just sometimes hard to understand.

Ha ha, that's a great explanation! The loop mode does toggle between play & stop - it does that in sample mode so it must in pattern mode. So that explains the silent repeat sequence - it's not extra pattern length at all, but the looped sample toggling off.

Thanks for taking the time to explain Billyboy.

Cheers
Jim

yo billy thanks so much.. a total dude!

cheers

richie