Hi there.
I am only a couple of years into synths and such, though I have played guitars for decades.
Sampling has always interested me, but I have no experience with it. The basics do not seem too hard to understand, but since I ordered my S2400, I have been wondering if I will be in over my head.
I think what freaked me out a bit was the many, many questions and answers on the forums. Half the time, I do not even understand what is being asked.
I am hopeful that having the unit in hand and being able to work on it in real life, will provide enough context for me to understand this beast and learn some of its secrets.
For now, I will keep watching YouTube tutorials and reading the manual.
Any suggestions or thoughts on how to most easily approach this machine, are most welcome.
I am very excited to receive my unit, and it looks like it will arrive B next week!
Kev
Hi, like everything else there’s a learning curve. So in the end it’s up to you. It depends on your motivation to learn.
Be careful because what’s shown in the video is sometimes outdated. And we might get a Christmas firmware update which could make a few things outdated again.
So spending time with the machine and the manual first is something I recommend.
I just got mine yesterday and my only sampler experience before this was playing around with a maschine mikro a few times like 7 years ago. So far it’s been a breeze. I watched the video manuals all the way through a handful of times and skimmed the manual a few times too so I wouldn’t hit major road blocks immediately. That being said, I personally feel like it’s pretty intuitive. I think you might actually be in a better position not having experience with samplers than someone who has only experienced MPC’s or something else and looking for workflow/features that aren’t there rather than learning the workflow/features it does have. Knowledge will come with time! In the meantime just try to have fun!
What’s up, Kev. Congrats on being an S2400 owner soon! It’s a really awesome piece of equipment.
I’ve found the S2400 pretty simple and straightforward. It took me about an hour just playing around with the unit to find about 70% of the amazing things that it could do and then about 30% for figuring out the rest by reading the manual.
If you’re already comfortable with drum machines and samplers then I would recommend that you first try to figure out how to do a task that you would usually do on another machine, on this one. That will then lead you down a rabbit hole of figuring out how to do all kinds of procedural things.
For me the first thing I tried was sampling. I poked around and saw the record button but noticed that didn’t do anything, so I combo tapped the shift and sample together, and then BOOM! Then I had to adjust the chop, and I thought the sliders weren’t working but then I figured out that the sliders are similar to DJ effect faders in the sense that the slider doesn’t register until you bring it to the starting point. Then from there, I wanted to save my samples and etc.
Anyways, you’ll figure it out just by experimenting and having fun and if you run into any issues then we’re here to help you on the forum.
Yo Kev, as a rather new sampler user myself, I can attest to the fact that the Isla is quite easy to come to terms with. In fact, part of the reason you might find yourself so confused by Q&A’s is due to the Isla’s incredibly versatile nature; it’s almost certainly going to be used by others in ways that you would never intend to use it (in fact, as mentioned by brad in a video, there’s even discussion of future use a mixer, utilizing the two phono inputs! Though as I understand it, that’s not a real priority, more of a wish list feature, so don’t hold your breath). However, that doesn’t mean that using the S2400 for your ideal purposes will be inevitably esoteric.
The only unintuitive aspect of the S2400 that I’ve come across so far is the override states, but unintuitive doesn’t mean bad. Once you learn to use the override behavior smoothly, you have the sudden ability to absolutely mangle your music, returning at any point to your original, clean composition, all at the simple press of a button. When you really understand what this means, you begin to see that you effectively have per channel iterations of the very thing that made the octatrack so ubiquitous; the performance fader! You see, even the unintuitive aspects of the S2400 have their benefit.
man I’m bad at readying the manual I’m better at learning from tutorial videos anyway I found it relatively easy to get in there and bang something out. The other functions may take a bit more to find out how to do but you learn them soon enough just by playing on the device regularly.
Oh wow. Thank you all for your explanations and support. It really made me feel a lot more at ease.
My unit arrives today. I’m like a dog waiting for his owner to come home.
Because it’s still going through some revision in firmware, and therefore some UI alterations, sometimes I just sit with the machine and play without the intention of creating anything. I just start messing with settings to see what happens. Of course it’s easy enough to get up and running but it sometimes pays to have no goal in mind. Good and interesting things happen when I just start pushing button combos and turning knobs.
Curious to know how you’re getting on with it? I’m somewhat nervous too despite having considerable MPC experience. Hoping I will gel with the S2400 workflow
Hi. I am back, and I thought I would share my experience as a person who is completely new to sampling, and a new-ish experience with synths, recording, etc.
After watching the Alex Ball tutorial videos a couple of times, I thought I would see how far I could get before digging into the manual.
I was able to load an internal sample and make a simple beat, as well as alter the basics of level, pitch, and env for each of 8 tracks.
Since then, the overall workflow started to make more sense.
Perhaps it is my OCDish tendencies, but what appeals to me a lot about the S2400, is how things are presented in such a way that once I spend only a little effort, everything sort of falls into place and I get it.
Some of the comments that were made were very helpful, and accurate in my case.
Oh man, one thing that absolutely kills the OCD side of me is the fact that the tempo and tap/repeat buttons are not switched with the enter and back buttons, respectively. It would make so much more sense
Go step by step. If you memorized the functions, you can get very creative and threat it like an instrument.
I swear I work with ableton, maschine, etc. but never got that fast now with this maschine. Everything is very logical at the end. And the looper is an other dimension.
In my opinion, it was a different experience coming to the S2400 from my MPC. I use my MPC for sampling, chopping (especially at zero-points) and a sprinkle of filters. The sampling and chopping is definitely easier for me in the MPC (probably the bigger screen), but for filtering the S2400 kind of easier to utilize.
I want to add that I spent an entire week using the Loop/Slice and sample modes of my S2400. I can can cross zero points and create perfect loops on the S2400, just as I can with the MPC Live. The screen size is negligible to me now.
Is be interested to know how you (or anyone else) may use the Looper.
I’ve never had any interest in using one but it seems like a waste especially for the added polyphony.
I record some synths, vocals live etc. 4-8 bars. Sometimes you get interesting results. You can later chop if you like. Its a creative tool. I use it for resampling (with ext. mixer). I even tought about record my fx returns from my mixer. Its fun, yes!
