Roland SP 303 Dr. Sample

my good friends got one. He does great stuff with it. He makes mostly non rythmic strange sample loops.

Tino corp. uses one

Panda Bear (of Animal Collective) and Kieren Hedben (Four Tet) also uses them.

anticon people use the shit out of them. or use to.

i have one. haven't used it in a while. it's a nice cheap substitute for the mpc.

3 problems i have with this or mpcs:

1) lack of much onboard memory and...

2) no simple way of transferring files to and from the device from a computer. uses flash memory cards, no usb2/firewire.

3) i'm so used to soft-samplers and wave editors these days that trimming samples on a hardware interface can be extremely tedious.

3b) ... but the benefit is that you get very organic and natural sounding samples (a la madlib/quasimoto) with rough editing.

the effects are pretty fun as well.

I just won one last night, Im excited as fuck.

also:

how'd you do that?

edit: kieran hebden is british?

like I mean, on e-bay. lol =/ I've been shopping around for one on e-bay for like 2 months, just can't seem to get the ones that are good deals. I have horrible luck I got it for around 212.

  Glass Plate said:

haha never heard him speak before. what a strange voice. "uum eerh uum" lol

damn these silly little samplers are expensive. i kina want one to play around with but i'll prob get as much use out of it as i did my drum machine.

I use an SP-303 as an effect processor. If you can get a few stereo jack adapters, you can do some really nice sounding natural effects with it. It's a good purchase, and it can survive a beating.

Unfortunately it's really unreliable for playing live shows. I had a few problems with samples 'over-playing' and it has a fit with Korg and Roland sequencers. However, it works well with an AKAI workstation. Go figure.

it IS a real bitch of a long time to get samples from the computer to the Sp-303... esp if you've got big samples, which sometimes require putting a few .Aiffs on a Smartmedia Card, putting it in the 303 and waiting for it to convert them, putting the SMC back in the computer, deleting the aiffs, saving the converted files to the hd, putting the SMC back in the 303 and formatting it, then putting it back in the computer to xfer the converted files BACK onto the SMC along with more raw .aiffs.... it takes a fucking while if yr maxing out a 32 or 64 mb card.

that said, I love this as a piece of live kit. durable as fuck, dont have to worry about anything happening to it, and if something does somehow you dont have to fret about finding a replacement as they're ebayed so often. basically it's as good as what you put in it, i mostly ignore the effects, but i think playing with 2 of these and an effects box or some pedals live can be 1000x more fun than using Ableton and not that different. esp in front of a lookie-lookie crowd, or if you're not playing 4/4 dance music.....

yeah the kieran hedban steve reid duet stuff seems like it'd be hella fun to play in.