Polvere 404

Roland’s SP-404 (2005) and its SX (2011) are small boxes with twelve rubber pads, a microphone, a line input and batteries: a sampler to take anywhere. Madlib, J Dilla’s collaborator, made records on it; the beat scene of Los Angeles, Low End Theory’s, played it live; lo-fi hip-hop was largely made on it, its VINYL SIM and LO-FI as much a part of the sound as the samples. Its limits are its character: a three-character display, effects that are on one pad or on all, a sequencer that records only what you play.

Polvere 404 follows the SX’s owner’s manual:

• Ten banks of twelve pads, A to J (each bank button holds two: press it again for F to J), 120 samples, kept in this browser.
• Sampling: REC, an empty pad, REC to start, REC to stop, from EXT SOURCE and the MIC. RESAMPLE records the sampler’s own output, effects and all, onto a new pad.
• Each pad: START/END/LEVEL (CTRL 1–3), TIME (its speed), LO-FI, GATE (plays while held), LOOP, REVERSE, STEREO or mono when sampling. A looping pad starts and stops with a press, as on the SX.
• Patterns: PATTERN SELECT, then REC and an empty pad; a bar of metronome, then loop recording that overdubs on every pass, quantized to S.8, S16, 4, 4.3, 8, 8.3, 16, 16.3, 32 or off, with a shuffle for the S settings; up to 99 bars.
• The effects: five on their own buttons, twenty-four under MFX, three controls each, the display showing the three letters the manual lists for them.

FILTER+DRIVE, VOICE TRANS, DELAY, ISOLATOR and DJFX LOOPER have buttons of their own. The others are under MFX: hold it and press a pad (1–12), or hold DJFX LOOPER too (13–24), or hold MFX and turn CTRL 3.

1. REVERB time · tone · balance
2. TAPE ECHO rate (tape speed) · intensity · balance
3. CHORUS depth · rate · balance
4. FLANGER depth · rate · feedback
5. PHASER depth · rate · manual
6. TREMOLO/PAN depth · rate · waveform (left tremolo, right pan)
7. DISTORTION drive · tone · level
8. OVERDRIVE drive · tone · level
9. FUZZ drive · tone · level
10. WAH peak · rate · manual
11. OCTAVE −2 octave level · −1 octave level · direct level
12. COMP sustain · attack · level
13. EQUALIZER low · mid · high
14. BIT CRASH sample rate · bit · filter
15. NOISE GEN white noise · disc noise · hum noise
16. VINYL SIM frequency range · noise level · wow/flutter
17. RADIO TUNING detune · noise level · balance
18. SLICER+FLG timing pattern · rate · flanger feedback
19. RING MOD frequency · sens · balance
20. CHROMATIC PS pitch 1 (semitones) · pitch 2 (semitones) · balance
21. PITCH pitch · feedback · balance
22. C.CANCELER L–R balance · low boost · high boost
23. SUBSONIC pitch · threshold · balance
24. BPM LOOPER length · timing (eighths) · loop on/off

Each is written again here from the manual’s description of what it does and of what its controls change, not from Roland’s code, which is not public: they sound like what they are, not like the SX’s exactly. One difference is plain: the SX’s TIME stretches a sample without changing its pitch; here TIME changes its speed, and its pitch with it, as the samplers of the 1980s did.

The SX came with Roland’s samples on its card. Polvere 404 starts instead with a kit made from Trappola’s 808 voices on bank A, and a loop on bank B, made in this page. For everything else there isFreesound, the Music Technology Group of Barcelona’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra’s collaborative database: half a million sounds recorded and shared by their makers. The library shows only those dedicated to the public domain (CC0), by category: drums, bass, loops, melodic, voice, textures and effects. A category can fill a whole bank, as a kit. It finds them throughOpenverse, WordPress and Creative Commons’ search of openly licensed works, which also reaches Wikimedia Commons’ recordings when you search by name.

EXT SOURCE, the sampler’s input, has two radios. One plays 78 rpm records from the Internet Archive, by decade and place, as Trappola’s does. The other is live: Radio Browser, an open directory of some fifty thousand internet stations kept by its listeners, by country, decade and genre. What comes in can be sampled, as producers have always sampled the radio.