Yeah... I got a 404, 505, 555 & 808. Right now I'm working to crack the mysteries of the 808... tracking beats from the 505 to the 808. After I get comfortable with this process I think I'm gonna start bouncing things through the 555 then to the 808 as loops. The slow speed of the zip drive on the 808 makes it impossible to play rapid fire one-shots, but it has a lot of other great capabilities. The loop capture on the 555 will work really well with it. The 404 is pretty much on standby in the current setup... altho sometimes I use it as a effects box for my drum machine.

I think the 555 --> 505 would work well though. Sometimes I run into polyphony issues with the 505... so you could do your drums and base on the 505, and melody on the 555, or something along those lines. I think the speed of the 555 workflow would make it the ideal box to capture your samples... vinyl, or USB... quicker card reading, and more sample room. Then you could trim stuff up, and bounce over to the 505 for chopping/sequencing. The effects of those 2 boxes complement each other well, since the 505 is more 303 era... pretty sure it has the vinyl sim that has been rated superior in previous debates, altho the 555 gives you some new effects to choose from, as well as effects memory for saving your settings.

OT; count S, take a pattern on the 505 and make it into a song, that way you can sync up the 505 and 808 to record perfect loops on the 808. basicly you put the 808 in standby but when you press play on the 505 it will begin recording. since the pattern is a song, it stops automatically at the end. do this for each part, voila u have 4 tracks. then you record the track to clipboard and finally to pad. i sold my 505 but that was the one thing i can't do anymore.
I too have wanted a 555 for some time. i just love the 404 though. if the 555 really is just a 404 with a bionic heart than it would be unstoppable.

^ oh yeah... that makes sense. Thanks jbl. You know... I think I remember you helping me make the initial decision to get the 808, sighting how you used your 505 & 808 together. Good stuff.

That's basically what I've been doing in syncing the 808 to the 505 to record the different parts of the song to individual tracks... ie., drums to track one, then mute everything but the bass and record that to track 2... etc. Good point though... the same method could be adapted to record loops for event recording in the 808, instead of audio tracks.

two ways it's helpful:
1. 808 LIVE
2. if you have a zip drive on the computer, you can import the pads as wav files; perfect loops to daw, 404, etc...

i just got a rm1x and want to try this out bc i miss that ability so much. almost none (only rm1x) of my gear has song function.

I got an rm1x too actually...

I like that thing a lot... tons of sounds. Programing songs is kindof complicated... but really just the tip of the iceberg. Sh*t gets real deep, real fast.

Great midi capabilities... swing... lots of adjustable parameters on everything. Have fun with it.

So you still have your 808?

I been using my mpc 1k as the midi master clock and then that goes into my Roland MC307. The MC307 goes into a yamaha yme-8 midi thru box. The 307 controlls my SP404, Zoom Sampletrak and my iPad on serparate midi channels. It sounds complicated but the workflow is really smooth. I still like using the machines individually but it's real nice to finally voltron that shit!

Back to the original question. Keep the 505 and get a cheaper 404 instead of the 555. Get a 555 if you need a USB audio interface or loop capture.

The MC-307 looks sick. Sounds like a work of technical mastery, especially getting the ipad software synced up. What app(s) are you using?

I was pretty stoked to get to the point of having a bunch of my boxes working in harmony from 1 master time code, but the craziness of having a single song spread across 4 pieces of hardware made me re-think things. Now I try to bounce sounds back and forth to consolidate them between 2 samplers, mostly for backup purposes.

loop capture alone is mad worth it!