Hey guys, so I've recently been trying to change my workflow up by taking my beats completely out of my computer/DAW and only making them on the SP-404. It's much more free-form and creative for me, and I love the concept of making beats this way, however I've found i'm bumping into a major issue and I don't know if it's expected behavior or if my SP-404 is acting buggy.

Basically, I'll start with a loop on say Pad 1. I'll resample that loop to Pad 2 with FX on it so it sounds nice, then I'll want to use that as the "backbone" for my beat. I resample Pad 2 then to Pad 3, and as Pad 2 loops on to Pad 3 I want to play other pads on top of it (like 5, 6, 7, etc.) and have those all record on to Pad 3 in one go. HOWEVER, when I do this, as soon as I hit any pad on top of Pad 3 (which is looping), my recording performance stops dead in its tracks! the Record button is still active, just nothing is playing. It literally resamples silence onto the pad as soon as I hit the pad I want to be played over the loop.

Whats the deal here? I know for a fact I've made beats in the past without this happening. It's like all of a sudden my SP-404 doesnt allow me to resample pads on top of each other in one go. Is this a memory issue? or some other problem?

I'd really appreciate if anyone can shed light on this for me

when resampling you can only sample 2 stereo sounds, 1 stereo 2 mono, or 4 mono sounds at the same time other wise it goes over its polyphony limit and the recording stops.

just do the math and resample accordingly.

in other words. you said you have 3 other pads (5,6,7) you want to add over the beat. so re-sample 5+6 together. Then take that and resample it with 7. Then take that and resample it with your other pads.

Thanks for the reply man, now that you say that I actually do remember reading that in the manual when I first got it. :facepalm:

That being said, doesnt the sound quality degrade every time you resample on to a new pad? I feel like doing the "pad by pad" method I'm just going to end up with muddy lo-fi beats by keeping it all in the SP-404. Any ways to deal with this, or do you guys just embrace the grunge?

We embrace the grunge and it doesn't grunge up too much. You'll only notice the grunge on the quiet end (i.e. reverb tails) and most of the time the end listener won't notice or care at all.

Your other option is to just play your shit like you were wanting to resample in your original post into external device (your computer maybe?) then resample that back into the machine to have less degradation. Or to skip even THAT degradation, load that recording directly onto your memory card and slap it back into your 404.

There's ways. They may not be what you expect, but there's ways. If I run into a 'flow' issue because of resample pad limitations, I personally record the take to cassette then resample the cassette back into the machine. Keeps the computer in the other room where it should be while I'm working.

This.