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Unfortunately, I know of no tool that does the job
well. I have an SP-808, and know how to use pretty much
all of it, though I must confess I don't get to very often. It has 4 voice
polyphony which would be a limitation if I was making all my sound with it, but
isn't to bad when you are using it as accompanyment, somewhat clunky
interface, but at least it has one. A teensy bit more forethought on Roland's
part would have made this machine absolutely killer. Too
bad.
It's good for playing back >really< long samples -
like entire songs, while playing loops and other stuff over the top,
impromptu. I have mine set up with long ambient backing tracks,
It uses zip disks, which is good and bad; it allows it up
to 45 minutes of sample time at 44.1k and 60 at 32 (which sounds very good), but
you're using zip disks; not the most reliable of medium. The best part of the
zip disks is that you can transfer loops on to them from your pc using a freebie
applet that Roland makes.
If 45 minutes isn't enough for you, it uses any IDE style
drives, or so I've been lead to beleive. The gear whore in me has been
lusting after a pair of ORB drives (one to put in the unit, one to put in my PC
for sample transfer), which are the only large capacity IDE drives I can seem to
find. Does anyone know of any other 3 1/2" IDE removable drives? Not that I
think I'll be getting them soon.
I've heard a lot of mixed reveiws about the su700, mostly
bad, but some good. It combines the now-legendarily slow Yamaha SCSI connection
with 'send it back to the factory' level hardware/OS issues. Still, I read
reviews at www.sonic-state.com written
by people on their third and fourth replacement, so there must be something
good to them. Waiting fifteen minutes to load 60 megs of samples isn't my cup of
tea though.
bIz
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