To celebrate Roland’s “404 day” on 4 April this year, Roland announced a surprise integration between Serato’s apps and the SP-404MKII performance groovebox, a beloved unit among certain electronic music producers, especially those who like to jam live.
From the point of view of producers, the news was received as a bit of a head-scratcher, to put it mildly. But from a DJ’s point of view, things aren’t quite so polarised, and for some DJs, this might be quite a fun integration.
Read this next: 7 Reasons Why The Roland SP-404 MkII Is A Great Sampler For DJs
So in this article and accompanying video, we’ll take a quick look at how this works and who it might be useful for.
At the beginning, I ought to point out that this unit has also been mapped to Serato Studio (Serato’s production software), but we’re talking specifically here about using it with Serato DJ Pro, and likewise, it also works with Serato DJ Lite (which we didn’t look at), though that cut-down version doesn’t have all of the features I’m showing you here.
Getting started
You must have both the latest firmware on the SP-404MKII (we needed to source a 32GB SD card to upgrade ours; anything bigger doesn’t work!) and the latest version of Serato. Also, the 404 has no RCA sockets, so you’ll need TRS leads to get the audio out of it.
Once you’re running, you’ll find that as with any small controller, the unit is fiddly to DJ with (not least because there are obviously no jogwheels). It certainly pays to have your tracks properly prepared and beatgridded with cues and so on all ready to go before you get started.
That said, with a bit of muscle memory and practice, you can control most of the features of Serato directly from the unit. We’re talking volume and crossfader, headphones volume and cue, basic transport, BPM, nudging and scrubbing through tracks, sync, key lock and then more performance-oriented features such as stems, loop roll, hot cues, and sampler.
Most of these features are demoed in the video (notably there’s no control over EQ, although you could use the SP-404’s built-in effects to approximate that), so I do suggest at this stage you go and watch that for the full lowdown.
But…why?
That brings me nicely on to why you might want to do this. So yes, you can control Serato reasonably well from it (albeit in a limited way) and with a bit of practice.
But this unit is a proven standalone tool, particularly suited to sampling live and then jamming with those samples, applying pretty powerful effects to them, looping, and so on.
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You can combine these effects and samples with a Serato performance; you can stop DJing altogether and just switch to this unit standalone with its traditional workflow, and then at any point switch back to just playing music.
(By the way, the SP-404MKII always did have a DJ mode, but it was extremely limited and involved putting tracks onto the SD card and so on.)
So if you’re dreaming of being able to perform your own music while blending it with other productions (and maybe just DJ with other people’s music before and after your part of the performance), potentially it can all be done with just one SP-404, your laptop, and a copy of Serato DJ Pro.
Finally…
Overall, this is an intriguing, if undeniably niche, implementation. I can’t help thinking that in rekindling their relationship with Roland on this unit, Serato may be planning bigger things in the future (in the past it has had some pretty good DJ controllers that Roland no longer makes mapped to its software).
Only time will tell on that, but meanwhile, if you want to learn more about DJing with Serato on this unit or any other, do check out our Serato Made Easy course.
