Now, one of the problems with hardware, and I think in particular the 404 series, is that we don't have access to much menu diving.

This is the first device, really, where you can actually go into menus and select different options, but it's still very limited.

So, what that means is that we have a lot of different key combinations and button combinations that we need to know in order to complete day-to-day activities and in order to help us make beats.

So, it's really difficult remembering a lot of these, and also it can even be difficult discovering them in the first place.

So, in this video what I've done is rounded up some of my absolute favorites.

I use these pretty much all the time now in my day-to-day beat making.

So, if you haven't seen these, you're definitely going to want to integrate them.

It makes beat making faster and it just cures so many headaches that you may have with this device.

So, let's get set up on the table and I'll talk you through these shortcuts.

Right guys, so here we are down at the SP-404 Mark II, and this is my custom skin.

Now, I had five of these available.

Three have already sold.

Thank you so much to the people that picked those up.

There's two left on my shop, spvids.com.

If you want to grab those, be quick because they do seem to be selling well these, and I probably won't have new stock till the new year now.

So, if you want to grab one of these before the end of the year, that would be really appreciated.

Check out spvids.com.

All the links are in the description below.

Really, really nice skins that were built in collaboration with Crema Cafe.

Okay, so let's go on to these shortcuts.

And the first one is the Cross Zero Finder.

Now, if you're not aware of what this is, I have already done a video about this, but I thought I'd include it anyway.

And this is for when you're cutting samples.

So, let's get this sample loaded up.

And let's hit Start and End.

Now, I'm going to go to the start point, and I'm going to zoom right in.

And you can hopefully see the dotted line along the center of the screen.

You'll be able to see this if you're on your device.

And what that is, is that's the zero cross point, and that is basically where there is absolute silence.

So, you can see where mine is actually cut.

It's not quite on that line.

And what you risk doing by chopping your samples there, is having those annoying little click noises at the start of your samples.

So, using a zero cross point feature means that you can get rid of all these very, very quickly.

And all you have to do is be on the point that you want to put the zero cross point on, and hit Resample.

You can see it's flashing here.

If I do that, you can see there it's found the nearest possible point where it's at absolute zero.

And automatically move my chop to there.

So, that means then I will have absolutely no chance of having that annoying crackle at the start of my samples.

You can also use that at the end of your samples as well, and it just means that everything sounds a lot cleaner, and you don't get those annoying little clicks.

So, that's the first one.

Really, really useful stuff.

The second one is one I've done a short on recently, and it's related to the one I've just talked about.

It's about start and end points.

Now, this was driving me absolutely crazy, that when I was trying to change between the start and the end point of a sample that I'd already marked, you had to turn the dial, and that moves the start points.

So, if you want a really fine tune, and you just want to change it a little bit, and then you want to get back to the start point, you twist it a bit, and it moves it completely.

If you've been using this device for any amount of time, you'll know exactly what I mean.

So, fortunately, there is a way around this.

So, let's just hypothetically put a start and an end point like this, so that you can see them both.

And let's say I want to adjust the start point now, but I don't want to move that point.

I just want to do a really fine adjustment.

Luckily, it's really easy as well.

You just hold shift, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to twist the end dial, and you can see it just zooms me in instead.

So, that means I can get to that point without it moving.

And if I want to shift to the start point now, well, sorry, no pun intended by saying shift there, but I hold shift, and I twist the start marking dial, and there we go again.

It's not moving it, it's zooming me in, and then I'm free to be able to move it however I want.

So, that is really, really handy stuff.

And that has saved me a lot of headaches over the past couple of days when I've been making beats, maybe even weeks actually.

It's really, really handy.

That's probably one of my favorite in the list, to be honest.

Okay, this is another one that came up in the comment section the other day, because I've done an old video about buses, and this feature hadn't actually been released at the time that I recorded that video.

But you can now mute the buses on three and four.

Now, this is super, super handy, because I use my buses for master effects.

And one of the things that you don't want is you don't want them on when you're re-sampling, because you only want them to be on the very last signal.

If you have them on when you re-sample, it will apply those effects, it will burn them into your sample, and then three and four will still be on it.

So, you'll have like a doubled up effect, which is really, really annoying.

So, for example, let's just say three and four are on on this one.

There we go, I've turned them on now.

And for whatever reason, let's just say that I don't want that effect on.

I don't want the effects from three and four on.

You just hold the value wheel, so this wheel here, you hold that down and press the bus effects button.

And you can see now it says bus three and four off.

Okay, so now it's turned it off.

If I want to turn it back on.

That's so handy, because before that,

I was doing shift and 16 all the time, and having to scroll this all the way back up to the top to turn it off, and then back on when I wanted to use it again.

But now, I can just do that.

And it kind of just mutes the effects.

It's so, so useful that guys, you'll definitely be using that one if you didn't know about it already.

Okay, you may assume you're using this one already, which I've just been doing, but it's shift and exit to pause samples.

Now, there's a couple of ways you can actually do this.

And one of them is robbed from the SP404SX or A.

It's kind of a little hack that I found out about a long time ago.

That if you want a sound to stop, just hit record and then press exit.

And all the sounds are stopped.

Now, there's also the way you can do it with exit, where you smash it four times, but it's so annoying.

You can see there it's come up saying stop on the screen, but it's just too many buttons to press every time you want to stop all the samples.

So, you can either do record and exit.

Or now, something that Roland have actually caked in to be able to use this as a proper function is shift.

You hold shift and press exit.

And you can see the stop comes up again.

So, that's another way of stopping it.

So, there's actually three different ways of stopping the samples there.

But I find shift and exit actually the most intuitive now.

I just find that really, really easy to do and really, really fast as well.

That's so useful if there's a sound playing on one of the banks and you can't find it.

Save you scrambling through all the banks, you can just do shift and exit and it'll stop absolutely every single sound.

Okay, the next tip is clearing all the samples on a bank.

Now, I'm not actually going to go through and do this because I don't want to delete the stuff that's on this bank.

But again, it's really easy to do.

You hold delete and you press exit.

And you can see here now I'm on bank E and it's saying delete bank E.

Now, to make this work, all I have to do is press delete again.

I'm not going to do it now because I want to keep these.

You just press delete.

And because this is using an internal memory, it's so fast, it literally just wipes them all straight away.

So, that is really, really useful.

And I guess, actually, that will probably depend on how long the samples are that are actually on your pads.

But I tried it before just to confirm this before I did the video and it wiped it so quickly.

So, if you change your mind and don't want to do that, you just hit exit and it comes out of it.

But yeah, hold delete, press exit, and you can see delete bank E.

Don't want to do it.

Delete if you do want to do it.

I don't want to.

So, I'm just going to press exit.

Okay, this is another one that I've done a video about but there's still people asking about this.

How do you preview sounds when you're importing?

It's really, really easy this one, guys.

So, if I go to shift and 14 to import sample, import from SD card, sample, and I'm going to go to SP Vids.

Again, a shameless plug, but all these packs are available on spvids.com if you want to support what I'm doing here.

Going to go to Lo-Fi Drums Volume 4.

Going to go to hats.

And now, instead of importing those, listening to what they sound like, figuring out they don't fit your beat, and then deleting them, all you have to do is press sub pad.

And you can preview the sound and you can jog through the wheel.

And there you go.

Super, super simple stuff.

That means you can preview it and let's say I want to put that on 15.

Do that.

Enter.

And we've got that sound on the pad that we want.

That's really, really useful.

It's obviously very important to listen to the samples that you're importing before you import them.

So, just hit sub pad when you're highlighting the sound that you want to listen to.

Okay, this was an interesting one.

How do you affect a sample that isn't currently playing?

So, I've got a drum loop here and let's say I want to play around with the parameters of pad one.

But I can't really do that because 16 is playing.

And I don't want that pad to sound.

For example, say if you were playing in a live session and you don't want that to sound.

Well, what you can do is press the value wheel and press the sample that you want to affect and then you can go into it and play around with the effects without stopping any of the other samples.

So, I'll show you what I mean now.

So, hopefully you can see there.

I pointed at the screen to show you that hopefully you can see that it changed from E16, the pad that was playing, to E1.

I'll just show you again quickly.

And that means there then that you are on E1 and you can change whatever you want to with that particular pad.

You could see I went in and started changing the start and end point.

Whatever you wanted to do, you could then do that while this one's playing.

So, that's another quite handy tip.

Personally, I've never had to use that but a few people have actually asked about that one.

So, that's how you do it.

Okay, the last point that I've got for you and it's another handy one.

It's keeping the effect parameters on the screen because they flash on and off so quickly.

So, let's say we're on pad 1 and let's say we want to do a reverb.

Now, watch how quickly the parameters leave the screen.

Okay, so that's just nowhere near enough time.

If you do go in and start turning the dials, it does come back up but it's just not very intuitive.

Fortunately, there is a way to get them to permanently show on the screen.

If you just hold remain, which is here above 2, hold that and then hit the MFX button, that brings up the parameters and then they no longer disappear off the screen.

So, you can fiddle around with them to your heart's content and get the sound that you want dialed in and you're not going to have to worry about that disappearing off the screen.

Right guys, that is it for this one.

I hope these shortcuts were useful for you.

I'm sure they are.

If you've got any of your own which I've missed in this video and you think they're worth knowing, leave them in the comments below and help the community out.

That would be really, really appreciated.

But apart from that guys, don't forget to subscribe if you're new around here.

Leave a thumbs up if you like this video and don't forget to check out all the links in the description to support what I'm doing here.

I'll be back with more content soon guys.

Keep making beats and take it easy.

Peace!