This Week in Music Gear: Even Freakier SP404 Hacks, Donner Sample Boy Revealed & More
This week brought a pretty interesting mix of new hardware, custom firmware and experimental ideas. The SP404 MK2 custom firmware scene somehow found another way to completely rethink what the sampler can do, Donner showed off Sample Boy, a new portable sampling workstation, and an open-source synth concept is being designed around swappable firmware from the beginning.
Here are a few things that caught my attention this week.
Freakier Firmware Adds Four FX Slots to Every SP404 MK2 Bus
I’ve covered quite a bit of SP404 MK2 custom firmware lately, but Freakier Firmware’s new Side-Piece beta might be one of the crazier developments so far.
Side-Piece is an unofficial firmware layer built on top of Roland’s official 5.52 firmware. One of its biggest additions is a completely new effects system that gives BUS 1 through BUS 4, along with the DRY path, four effect slots each. Those slots can be arranged in any order and currently include filtering, lo-fi processing, EQ, chorus, phaser, delay and transient shaping.
That effectively turns each bus into its own small effects chain rather than being limited to the SP’s normal effect routing. Considering how much of my own SP404 workflow already revolves around combining and routing effects, this is probably the Side-Piece feature that immediately caught my attention.
It doesn’t stop with effect stacking either. Side-Piece adds four LFOs that can modulate effect parameters or even other LFOs, dedicated EQ on every bus, Euclidean rhythm lanes, frequency-based chopping, a ducker, tempo pumping and additional time-stretch controls.
There are still some important beta limitations. Features like frequency chopping are still missing things like undo, so this definitely isn’t something I’d treat as a finished replacement for Roland’s firmware yet.
Still, seeing four effects running on each bus is kind of ridiculous considering this is the same hardware we’ve been using for years. The recent custom firmware projects are starting to reveal just how much more might be possible inside the SP404 MK2 than the stock software exposes.
More info:https://freakierfirmware.com/sp-404mk2/
Donner Shows Off the Sample Boy Sampling Workstation
Donner showed a working prototype of an upcoming sampler called the Sample Boy at Beijing Modular this weekend, and this one looks much more interesting now that we finally know what it actually does.
Sample Boy is a portable sampling workstation built around a 2.8-inch color display, four clickable encoders, 16 backlit buttons, a jog wheel, crossfader and several additional controls. It also has a built-in microphone and speaker, along with MIDI, analog sync, USB audio and a microSD slot.
The current prototype supports up to 32 voices and includes a seven-track sequencer. Audio can be sampled at 48 kHz/24-bit from the built-in microphone, line input, USB audio or internally, with input effects including filtering, EQ, compression and distortion that can be recorded directly into the sample.
Once audio is recorded, there are tools for adjusting start and end points along with quick slicing across the 16 buttons. Donner is also currently allowing around 480 seconds of stereo sampling time, with roughly twice that available when working in mono.
There were images of Sample Boy floating around earlier this year, but this is the first time we’ve gotten a much clearer picture of what the finished instrument might actually be. It seems much more focused on sampling and sequencing than simply trying to be a cheaper version of something like the OP-1.
Donner says the hardware is fairly close to completion while the software is still being developed. Sample Boy is currently targeting a 2027 release, with pricing and a more specific launch date still to be announced.
More info / prototype demo via Sonicstate:
OPEN-1 Is Being Designed Around Custom Firmware From the Beginning
Most of the custom firmware projects I’ve been covering involve people taking existing instruments apart years after release and discovering new things they can make the hardware do. OPEN-1 is an interesting reversal of that idea because community firmware is supposed to be part of the instrument from the very beginning.
OPEN-1 is an early open-synth concept from RedtailWorks built around firmware that can be loaded from an SD card and switched directly from the hardware. Instead of buying one instrument with a fixed synthesis engine, the idea is for the same box to become completely different instruments depending on which community-built firmware you load.
The current v0.4 design uses a Daisy Seed processor and includes 16 RGB pads, four knobs, two touch strips, a color display, USB host support, MIDI, stereo audio input and output, microSD storage, a built-in speaker and battery power. Earlier versions included their own keyboard, but the latest design removes it in favor of connecting an external USB or MIDI controller.
That change is also intended to help keep the cost down. The project's current goal is eventually to land around $159 for early crowdfunding units, $179 for backers and roughly $199 at retail, although all of those numbers are still targets rather than announced prices.
And that distinction is important because OPEN-1 is not a finished product yet. The project is currently in the breadboard-prototype stage, with custom circuit boards, community firmware development, crowdfunding and manufacturing all still ahead of it.
Even so, the concept feels especially timely. After watching people build completely new operating systems for inexpensive hardware and unlock features inside existing samplers and grooveboxes, designing an instrument specifically around that kind of experimentation makes a lot of sense.
More Info from RedtailWorks:
The thing that keeps standing out over the last few weeks is how much less fixed music gear is becoming. Freakier Firmware is adding an entirely new effects architecture to hardware that’s already several years old, while OPEN-1 is being designed around the assumption that users should be able to completely change what an instrument does.
At the same time, something like Sample Boy shows there’s still plenty of room for new dedicated sampling hardware. Between manufacturers continuing to add features and communities finding their own ways to push existing machines further, there’s a lot happening beyond simply buying the next new piece of gear.
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