SPf1200

Another take on the SP-1200

SPf1200 is another way of looking at the machine, more geared toward performance. When people mod a machine, they usually add a few features and leave the rest alone. Here, stock functions come out to make room for new ones, and some users will miss a few of them. The idea is to offer something else, even if that means losing some of what was there.

I love this machine, but I have to admit some of its ergonomic choices never suited me. I also wanted to see how far it could be pushed without touching the hardware.

It is written for the original SP-1200. I do not have an SP-12 or Rossum's reissue at hand to adapt it to. That may come later.

Input monitoring

Press SAMPLE and output 7 plays whatever comes into Sample In: while you set the level by the meter, while the machine waits for the threshold, and on through the recording. It comes out of the mix and out of its own jack, there is nothing to switch on, and it stops when you leave the page, or open Assign Voice, Input Gain or Sample Length, which have no meter. The factory machine samples blind: you read the meter, and you hear the take once it is on a pad.

A1         +00dB


If a monitor board in your machine already puts the input on the mix, you hear it twice, the second copy a little late. Key 8 on the Sample page turns output 7's copy off, and 8 again turns it back on. On Input Gain, 8 does the same and goes back to the meter. Every power-up starts with it on.

Key 8 asked for by Cookin Soul, @cookinsoul, for a machine with Jazzcat's SPM04 monitor board.

Lazy chop

Start a take on the Sample page as usual, 7 for the threshold or 9 at once. While it records, hit a pad at each cut, then press PLAY to end the take.

Every pad you hit is a cut: from that point on, the take goes into the next empty pad, whichever pad you hit. The cut lands on a zero crossing just before the hit. With no pad hit, it is a plain take, as before.

The next empty pad is the first one after the take's own, in the order A1 to A8, then B, C and D. Pads that hold a sound are skipped, banks E to H are never used, and a take into D8 cannot chop.

Once you have hit a pad, the take runs past the Sample Length, from one stretch of memory to the next, about ten seconds on an empty machine. A hit starts the next stretch on the spot when the stretch has less room left than the slice you just made, so a slice as long as the last one lands whole in its pad. A pad the machine starts by itself, at 9 or at a new stretch, takes its start from a hit within 0.3 s, so the moment before makes no pad of its own.

Each new stretch takes an empty pad of its own, so a hit only cuts while a pad is left over. With none, the hit is ignored and the take ends when its stretch is full. It also ends when the sample memory is full.

Chop04 is good  
                

Line 1 then counts the sounds, whatever ended the take. Each is an ordinary sound, to play, truncate or delete like any other.

On the factory machine, a record sampled whole still has to be cut into its hits afterwards, pad by pad, and a take gets one pad and 2.5 s at most.

Asked for by P Money, @p_money.

Auto-truncate a sample

Open Truncate (SET-UP 19), pick the pad and press ENTER. On the values page, key 9 reads the sample and sets both ends for you.

S=01267  A1     
E=07810  L= NONE

The start goes on the last zero crossing at least a millisecond before the first sound above the noise, so the attack stays whole and the cut does not click. The end goes about 20 ms after the last. Nothing is cut yet: the faders still move both values, and ENTER still asks before the truncation becomes permanent. Key 7 puts back the values from before the 9.

A sample that never rises above the noise, anything under about -35 dBFS, keeps its values.

On the factory machine both ends are found by hand. A take rarely starts on the hit, and unless you stop it, it runs to the end of the Sample Length, long after the tail has gone. Truncate trims both ends with two pairs of faders, on a page that counts in samples, 26 to the millisecond, and finding the attack and the end of the tail that way is slow work.

Asked for by Lewis Parker, @lew_ultra.

Tune and decay together

Every sound keeps a pitch and a decay. Open the Tune/Decay page: a T stands over every bar, and each slider sets its pad's pitch. Hold the page's button, the one under Performance, and the sliders set the decays instead, a D over every bar. Let go and the page shows the pitches again.

TTTTTTTT
12345678

DDD DDDDD
12345678

A sample tuned down plays longer: hold the button and pull the same slider down to shorten it. Hit a pad, the button held or not, to hear where you are. The button alone still steps to Mix, when you let go of it. Save Sounds keeps both values with the sounds.

Two catalog functions work with it. 19 Default Decay sets the decay of every sound that has none of its own: once the button and a slider give a sound its own, 19 leaves that one alone, until sounds saved by another OS are loaded. 20 Init DK/Tune sets a sound's base pitch, 0 to 31 with 16 in the middle, and each pad's slider on the page moves it up to eight semitones down or seven up.

The factory machine gives a sound one of the two, chosen in SET-UP 18 a pad at a time: a tuned sound plays at the default decay, and a decayed one at the middle pitch. A sound decayed that way, as six of the factory kit are, becomes a pitch and a decay of its own when the page shows its bank, and plays as before. SET-UP 18 is gone.

Asked for by @chlodwigplatz_puetz_money.

Two-line segment screen

The segment screen, the one you look at more than any other, now uses both of its lines. On the factory OS the second one is blank.

Seg 07   ♪= 90.0
                

S07 Sw63 ♪= 90.0
1/16t           

S07 Sw63 ♪= 90.0
1/16t 01:01  Rec

• S07 Segment number. Seg 07 shortened to S07, which buys three characters. line 1 · 0-2
• Sw63 The segment's swing, which otherwise only exists on a page of its own. When the swing is on the sixteenth, the w becomes a double sixteenth. line 1 · 4-7
• ♪= The tempo header. The = becomes * while TAP/REPEAT is held down. line 1 · 9-10
• 1/16t Auto Correct, permanently on screen instead of two pages away. line 2 · 0-4
• 01:01 Rolling: bar and beat inside the segment, so it restarts at the top of every pass. Stopped, it keeps where the loop stopped, or stays empty. A pad you press takes the field over and shows its bank, its number and its output. line 2 · 6-10
• RecPlay or Rec, following the transport and the REC button's punch in and out. Cnt during a count-in, and Undo or Redo after REC and COPY. line 2 · 12-15

A grid in Step Program

Press Step Program on the main screen, as on the factory machine. The bottom line draws the bar: a column a step of the Auto Correct grid, a row of dots a pad of the bank shown, pad 1 on top. The column of the step you are on blinks. The top line gives the bar and the beat, the bank, the pads that play in that column, a digit each, and a plus when a pad of another bank plays there too.

01:4 A .23..6..+
     

Bar 1, beat 4, bank A: pads 2, 3 and 6, and a pad of another bank.

These are the factory's keys, and they do what they did. A pad adds its sound on the step, ERASE and a pad take it out, BANK shows the next bank, banks E to H too, and PLAY held runs through the steps, the bar drawn again as the next one comes. Both arrows play the step they land on: the left one played nothing on the factory machine.

• 01:4 The bar and the beat of the step, as the segment screen counts them. line 1 · 0-3
• A The bank shown. BANK shows the next one. line 1 · 5
• .23..6.. Its eight pads in order: a pad's digit when it plays in the step's column, a dot when it does not. They are the eight rows of dots below. line 1 · 7-14
• + Another bank plays there too. BANK to go and see it. line 1 · 15
• Grid The bank shown, a column a step: a row of dots a pad, pad 1 on top and pad 8 at the bottom. A bar line marks a beat with nothing on it, or a bar when the screen holds two or more. The step's column blinks. line 2 · 0-15

You read lines more than dots. The hat is a dotted line along the third row, the kick and the snare stand out above it, and the line on top names what plays where the cursor is.

A column is a step of the grid, so a triplet reads as a triplet: the tom's fill at the end of bar 2 lands on three sixteenths at 1/16, and fills its beat, three columns of three, at 1/8t. The columns past the end of the segment stay empty.

HiRes keeps a hit where it was played, 96 ticks to the bar, which sixteen columns cannot show. The screen draws the bar in sixteenths, each hit in the column of its sixteenth, and the arrows still move a tick, so the cursor stays on a column for six steps. ERASE takes out the hit on the step's own tick: the two rims of bar 1 were played late, and HiRes is where you step onto them.

The display draws with eight shapes at a time, one for each mix of pads on the screen, given out from the left. A ninth mix shows as #, and the line on top still names its pads. The busiest of my disks needs four.

The plus reads the segment: a pad of another bank struck or erased on the step shows once you move on. In HiRes, a pad struck on the last tick of a sixteenth shows in the next column for one step.

Ms01 Bt04  1/16 
A2  A3  A6  B2  

The factory page named the sounds of one step and nothing of the steps around it, so a pattern was read a step at a time. 21 Name Sound went again to make room for the grid.

See and set a pad's output

Hit a pad on the main screen and line 2 says which of the eight outputs it goes to, after its bank and its number. To send it to another one, hold REC and press 1 to 8 on the keypad: the last pad you hit goes to that output, and the readout shows it at once.

S07 Sw63 ♪= 90.0
1/16t A3-7      

It works stopped, playing and recording, and the loop keeps running. In a take, REC is the punch, as it always was, so there the chord punches too. It is the setting of the Assign Channel page, so it is saved with the sounds and a factory OS loads it as it is. With REC held, 0 and 9 do nothing, and with REC up the keypad picks a segment as it always did. A pad of E to H has no output: it reads M, and the chord does nothing.

Dynamic Allocation changes what that digit means. Switch it on for an output pair (Catalog Functions, code 22) and the machine alternates between the pair's two jacks on successive hits, so a hit never cuts off the tail of the one before. The digit then names one jack of two, and a star in column 10 says so.

S07 Sw63 ♪= 90.0
1/16t A3-7*     

The star is what separates the two: with Dynamic Allocation off the column is blank and the jack is the whole answer. Line 1 already uses the same mark, turning the tempo's equals sign into a star while TAP/REPEAT is held.

While the sequencer is rolling that field belongs to the bar counter, so a pad you press gets it back only until the next beat. Stopped, it stays until you press another.

Stock, the output is only knowable, and only changed, on the Assign Channel page: go there, press a pad, read the channel, press the next pad, read the channel. Anyone who has patched the eight outputs into a desk has done that walk, and done it again after loading somebody else's kit.

Mute a sound

Hold REC and hit a pad: that sound stops coming out of the segment. REC and the same pad again, and it comes back. The hit itself stays silent. Line 2 shows -- where the output channel usually goes while the sound is out, and the channel again once it is back. A pad you play by hand still sounds.

S07 Sw63 ♪= 90.0
1/16t A3 -- Play

A mute stays with the sound through a bank change: it follows the kick wherever the kick sits. Recording is untouched, so you can mute a part, overdub against it, and bring it back.

A sampler slaved over MIDI goes quiet with it: muting a part mutes its MIDI too. Tested with an S950 on the MIDI out: take the pad out and the S950 stops with the internal sound, bring it back and they both return.

It works from the segment screens and from the song screen, where line 2 belongs to the step you are on, so the mute happens without the readout. It does not reach the song edit screen, REC/EDIT in song mode, where REC and a pad plays the pad as it always did.

The REC that starts a take is not part of it. Hold REC, press RUN/STOP and hit a pad with REC still down: the pad sounds and lands on the first step, as on the factory OS. Let REC go, and REC and a pad mutes again.

A mute is live state. It is saved nowhere, and once the readout has gone back to the bar counter nothing says the kick is missing on purpose. So while anything is out, line 1 carries an apostrophe in the space between the segment number and the swing.

S07 Sw63 ♪= 90.0
1/16t 02:03 Play

S07'Sw63 ♪= 90.0
1/16t 02:03 Play

Hold REC and press ERASE and every mute clears, so the end of a pass does not mean hunting for the four pads you took out. It works stopped, playing and recording, and the loop keeps running.

Solo one sound or several

Hold REC and SEGMENT LENGTH, then hit a pad that is not muted: that sound keeps playing and everything else goes out. A muted pad comes back first, and the next hit solos it. Keep the two held and hit other pads, and each one joins it, the two hi-hats together, say. Hit one of them again and it is the only one left. To move a solo to another sound, hit that one twice: once to add it, once to leave it on its own.

S07'Sw63 ♪= 90.0
1/16t A3-7  Play

The hit itself is silent and goes into no take. A pad with no hits in the segment solos too, and the loop goes quiet. Stopped, it works the same, and you hear it at PLAY. As for a mute, the REC that started a take does not count: let it go and hold it again.

The readout is about the pad you hit, and that sound is still playing, so it shows the output channel where a mute shows --. The apostrophe on line 1 is there all the same, since everything else is out.

A solo does not remember the mutes you had before it, so there is nothing to undo. REC and ERASE gets you out, as it does for mutes, and everything plays again.

MIDI Banks E to H

Press BANK past D and it goes on to E, F, G and H, then round to A again. A pad on those four banks plays nothing on the machine and sends a MIDI note of its own instead. That is 32 more pads for a sampler or a synth on the MIDI out, next to the 32 sounds the machine plays.

Hold BANK and hit a pad, 1 to 8, to go straight to bank A to H from whichever bank you are on. That pad plays nothing and goes into no take. BANK on its own still steps to the next bank.

There are only four bank lamps, so E to H show theirs turned over. E lights every lamp but A's, F every lamp but B's, and so on to H.

The notes go out on the machine's MIDI channel, the one banks A to D use, and each note off follows at once, as it does there. Banks A to D keep E-mu's keys, from 36 to 67. With Pitch Keys on, a pad of E to H still sends its own key. The note names put key 60 at C3, as Ableton Live and Logic Pro do.

For velocity, turn on Dynamic Buttons, SET-UP 14: the velocity then follows how hard the pad is hit, in sixteen steps. With it off, as it is at every power-up, a note goes out at 124, a full hit's, however hard the pad is hit. Only the accent on slider 2 lowers it then, off the beat, as it does on banks A to D. A take keeps each hit's velocity.

S07 Sw63 ♪= 90.0
1/16t E3-M      

The readout says so: M, for MIDI, where the output jack usually goes. The Erase page names the pad E3 too, and Step Program draws bank E as it draws A.

Otherwise these pads do what a pad does. They record, roll under TAP/REPEAT and play back with the segment. They mute and solo the same way, and their mutes are their own: REC and E3 silences E3's notes while A3 keeps playing, and a solo on E3 leaves only E3, with A3 out like the rest. REC and ERASE clears every mute, on all eight banks. Erasing keeps them apart too: ERASE and E3 takes out E3's notes and keeps A3's, while the loop plays and on the Erase page.

While a bank is in Multi Pitch, BANK stays on A to D, and BANK held with pad 5 to 8 does nothing: one note from eight pitches would lose the pitch. E to H come back once no bank is in Multi Pitch. Exit Multi Mode, SET-UP 13, chosen on E to H takes the machine to the bank under it: E to A, F to B, G to C and H to D.

Multi Level works on E to H too, one note at eight velocities: Multi Level on E to H.

A page that takes a sound from a pad works on A to D: Multi Pitch, Sampling, Load Sound, Truncate, Delete and the others, all but the Erase page and Multi Level. Pressed on E to H, the pad first takes the machine back to A to D, so E3 picks A3, and it sounds where the page plays it. The Mix and Tune/Decay pages stay closed on E to H and their faders do nothing, since there is no sound there to level or tune. The three faders that TAP/REPEAT turns into the grid, the accent and the swing work as everywhere.

Banks E to H asked for by Lewis Parker, @lew_ultra.

BANK and a pad asked for by @chlodwigplatz_puetz_money.

Multi Level on E to H

On a bank E to H, press SET-UP 12 and a pad. The machine stays on that bank, and its eight pads all send the chosen pad's note, each at its own velocity: 44 on pad 1, up to 124 on pad 8. A sampler that stacks layers of one sound on a single key, by velocity, plays them as a bank: eight layers, eight pads.

Every pad's readout names the chosen one, E3-M on line 2. The velocities go out live and in a take, and the take plays them back as they were hit. The bank under it, A for E, keeps its eight sounds. Exit Multi Mode, SET-UP 13, gives the eight pads their own notes back, and so does a Multi mode taken on the bank under it.

On A to D, Multi Level is the factory's: eight levels of one sound. Multi Pitch stays off E to H, since one note at eight pitches would go out as one note.

Undo and redo a take

Hold REC and press COPY after a take, and the segment is back the way it was before you pressed REC and PLAY. Press it again and the take is back. Each press flips between the two, so you can compare them by ear for as long as you like. Playing or recording, it stops first, so in the middle of a take it means stop and drop this one. The status field on line 2 says Undo or Redo, whichever just happened, on that segment's screen until the transport starts again.

S07 Sw63 ♪= 90.0
1/16t       Undo

S07 Sw63 ♪= 90.0
1/16t       Redo

The Erase page comes back the same way, a sound erased from the segment, and so does Copy Segment when it appends, onto the same segment or onto one that has hits. Each counts as a new take.

The chord does nothing, and leaves the transport rolling, when the take before can no longer be brought back: another segment selected, a take on another segment since, a song edited since, the memory cleared or loaded from disk, this segment erased or loaded over. A swing, a length or a signature changed after the take goes back with it. A segment bigger than a quarter of the free memory cannot be taken back. Its take has all the memory, as it always did, and in that take REC and COPY is REC alone: a punch in or out, with the loop still rolling.

It works from the segment's main screens. In Step Program it leaves the page and takes back the steps entered since it opened. Opening Step Program counts as a new take: after a look at the page, even with nothing entered, the take before it can no longer be undone. A sub-page keeps its own screen, and on a song screen that button is Subsong, and keeps its job.

Metronome on/off shortcut

Hold REC and press METRONOME, and the click stops without leaving the segment screen. Do it again and it comes back on the value it had, 1/4 or 1/16t or Click, whatever its page was set to. If you switched the click off on its page instead, the chord brings back the last value it turned off itself, or 1/4 if it has turned none off since power-up. METRONOME on its own still opens that page. While the click is off, the note in the tempo header is drawn hollow, whichever way it was switched off.

S07 Sw63 ♪= 90.0
1/16t           

S07 Sw63 = 90.0
1/16t           

Off is immediate. On waits for the loop to come round, so the first click lands on the beat. In a take or a count-in, REC is the punch, as it always was, so there the chord punches too. It works from the segment's main screens and from Step Program: any other sub-page keeps its own screen, and in song mode that button is Trigger, and does what it always did.

One-bar count-in

Hold TAP/REPEAT and REC, then press PLAY: one bar of metronome with everything else silent, then recording punches in on the downbeat, at the top of the segment. One bar, whatever the length of the segment: three beats in 3/4, and on a segment shorter than a bar, the segment itself. Turn the metronome on and its volume up before you start, because the count-in is nothing but the metronome: set to Off, or with the knob down, that bar is silent and there is nothing to count against. Plain REC+PLAY still starts writing on the first tick, the way it always did.

S07 Sw63 ♪= 90.0
1/16t 01:04  Cnt

S07 Sw63 ♪= 90.0
1/16t 01:01  Rec

Open pages on the fly

Press a page button while the loop plays or records, and the machine stops itself and opens the page, keeping the take as if you had pressed PLAY. That is the four module buttons, Setup, Disk, Sync and Sample, and the eight of the Programming row. PLAY is how you leave, Segment Length included.

S07 Sw63 ♪= 90.0
1/16t 01:01 Play

Segment screen, playing

A few keep the loop going. SWING does not stop the machine at all: see Swing while playing. While recording, Auto Correct opens its page and Setup reaches multipitch and multilevel, and the take keeps running, as E-mu made them. ERASE stops nothing on a main screen: held with a pad while the loop plays, it is E-mu's own live erase.

On a stock SP-1200, playing means locked. Press one of those twelve while the loop is playing and nothing happens at all. Press PLAY, press the button, do the thing, then press that same button again to get back out. On Segment Length, PLAY did nothing either, on a segment with anything in it.

Recording lets two through, and E-mu wrote both down. Auto Correct opens its page. Setup reaches multipitch and multilevel, “however, its LED will not light if accessed during recording”. Button by button, in all three transport states, the stock machine agrees with its own 1987 manual, and the other ten are as shut in record as they are in play.

Swing while playing

Press SWING while the loop plays or records, and the loop keeps going. You change the value with the arrow keys and hear the difference against what you are already listening to.

S07 Sw63 ♪= 90.0
   Swing: 63%   

The new value is heard on the next tick. A change up from 50% waits for the loop to come round. SWING again closes the page onto the play or record screen, whichever the transport is on, and so do ENTER, TEMPO, SONG and the key left of the sliders that picks Tune/Decay, Mix or Multi Mode. PLAY stops the loop, as anywhere.

On the factory machine, Swing is one of the twelve page buttons that do nothing while the loop plays. It is the only one of them that now opens without stopping the machine.

Swing on the sixteenth

Press SWING, and on its page the right arrow key goes on past 71% to three more values: 58, 67 and 75% on the sixteenth. The left arrow comes back down. These push the second sixteenth of every eighth: one, two or three ticks late, out of the twelve an eighth lasts. At 67% the two sixteenths are exactly 2:1.

S07 Sw71 ♪= 90.0
Swing 1/16: 58% 

S07 S♬58 ♪= 90.0
1/16            

While it plays, one sixteenth value to another is heard on the next tick. Eighths to sixteenths, or back, waits for the loop. Down to 50% is heard at once from either.

E-mu's six values, 50 to 71%, push the second eighth of every beat and mean what they always meant. The three new ones are values no factory OS writes. A sequence saved on the factory OS plays exactly as it did, on every Auto Correct grid.

A tick is the finest step there is. The machine counts 24 to the beat, so one tick late is the smallest swing it can play: 58% on the sixteenth, and E-mu's 54% on the eighth. An MPC60 counts 96, where one tick late is 52%. Today's MPCs count 960, and that is how they get down to 51%.

Auto Correct on slider 1

Hold TAP/REPEAT on a segment screen and slider 1 is the Auto Correct grid: eight positions, 1/4 at the bottom of the throw and 1/32t at the top, the value following on line 2 where it already lives. Playing, the new grid takes over at once; in a take, when the loop comes round.

S07 Sw63 ♪* 90.0
1/16t 01:01 Play

Accent on slider 2

Hold TAP/REPEAT and slider 2 sets how far a roll drops off the beat. Hit a pad with TAP/REPEAT still held and a flat 1/16 roll comes out loud on the beat and softer in between. At the bottom of the throw the accent is off and the roll is flat, as on the factory machine. Nothing on the screen shows the fader: you hear it.

Stopped, no beat is running, so a roll counts its own: your press is the beat, each repeat is one grid step on, and a new press starts it on the accent again. The beat is the one the segment's time signature sets: on a quarter note, at 1/16 one hit in four is full, at 1/8 one in two.

It is recorded, too. Punch in and roll with the fader up, let go of everything, play the loop back: the beat still lands full with the rest ducked underneath. It survives a save.

While TAP/REPEAT is held, the hits already in the segment duck the same way, if they were recorded flat. A hit that carries a level of its own keeps it: an accent recorded before, Dynamic Buttons or Multilevel. Let go of TAP/REPEAT and the accent is off.

The segment format has carried a level per hit since 1987, and E-mu gave two ways to set it: Dynamic Buttons, where the level is how hard you hit the pad, and Multilevel, where it is which of the eight pads you hit, one sound spread from soft on the left to loud on the right.

The fader is a third way, and the 1987 manual says there is none: “Real time level changes are not recorded along with the segment; to record different drum levels, either use the dynamic buttons option or access multilevel.” Nothing here is a new field or a new format, so the groove saves with the segment and would play on a stock machine. The only new thing is what sets the level: where the hit falls against the beat.

Swing on slider 3

Hold TAP/REPEAT on a segment screen and slider 3 is the selected segment's swing, without the Swing page. Its eight steps are the page's first eight values: 50 to 71% on the eighths from the bottom of the throw, then 58 and 67% on the sixteenths at the top. 75% stays on the page.

S07 Sw63 ♪* 90.0
1/16t 01:01 Play

The swing on line 1 follows the fader at once. What you hear lands the way the page's does, waits included: up from 50%, or between the eighths and the sixteenths, it starts when the loop comes round. The time signature stays as you set it. On a segment that does not exist yet, the first move makes it, two bars of 4/4, as the Swing page does.

Beat repeat

Hold SONG while a segment plays and it stutters: on every beat it jumps back to its first beat, for as long as you keep the button down. Let go and the segment carries on from its second beat, in time, so the loop now comes round as many beats later as you held it. The transport never stops and nothing is recorded.

SONG is read on the beat. Press it anywhere in the bar and the first stutter lands on the next beat, and a press that starts and ends between two beats does nothing. While the loop plays, SONG never switches to song mode. Stopped, it does, as it always did. A swung segment stutters swung.

Hold TAP/REPEAT, then SONG, and it repeats the beat you are on instead, for as long as both are down, and the display stays on that beat. Let go and the segment goes on from the next beat, in time. Hold SONG first and the segment has already jumped back to its first beat, so adding TAP/REPEAT repeats that one.

Neither does anything during a take, from the count-in until the transport stops, even after you punch out.

Save all to disk

On the disk menu, key 9 saves the sequences and then the sounds, in one go. It asks first: 9 for yes, 7 goes back to the menu.

   Disk [0-9]   
Save All?    y/n

A save asks because it writes over what the disk held, and that was the only copy. Key 0 still loads sequences and sounds together without asking, as it always did. If the drive reports an error on the sequences, the save stops there, and the error stays on the screen instead of a Complete from the sounds covering it.

The factory machine loads both from key 0 but never saved both. You save sequences on one screen, then walk over to another screen and save sounds, and forgetting the second one is how a session goes missing. Key 9 used to format a disk, which this OS gave up for the room.

Rossum's reissue of the machine made the same trade, replacing format and copy with Save All As. Earlier versions of this OS saved both from key 0 on the Save Seqs screen. That screen is the factory's again, where any key but 7 means yes, so 0 there saves the sequences alone.

Tempo sequence saved

The tempo is now saved with the sequences, tenths included. Save Sequences, key 1 of the disk menu, and Save All, key 9, write it. Load Sequences and Sounds, key 0, and Load Sequences, key 3, bring it back.

S01 Sw50 ♪= 90.0
1/16            

S07 Sw63 ♪= 93.5
1/16t           

For segments at one tempo, that is all there is to it: save, switch off, load, and the loop is back at the speed it was made at. The machine still starts at 90 with empty sequences, because the tempo comes with the load, not with the power.

Segments meant at different tempos still need a song. The disk keeps one tempo, the one the machine is on when you save, and a song plays at its own, as it always did.

On the factory OS, segment mode has one tempo for all its segments, and no disk ever kept it. A song keeps its own, so the one way to keep a tempo was to make a song for it. Load sequences without one and they came back at whatever tempo the machine was on.

A disk saved on an earlier OS, the factory's included, has no tempo on it. Loading it leaves the tempo where it is, and its songs play at their own. While songs from such a disk are in memory, a save writes no tempo, so that those songs stay whole. Clear Seq Mem, Clear All Mem or a load of sequences without them takes them out, and the tempo saves again.

How it stays safe

On the original SP-1200, a bad OS disk cannot brick the machine. The OS is not in ROM: it is loaded into RAM from the floppy every time you switch the machine on. A broken disk gives you a failed boot. Put the factory disk back in and the machine is what it was five minutes ago.

A disk of sequences saved here loads on the factory OS like any other, and plays there as it does here but for three things: banks E to H, the swing on the sixteenth and the saved tempo. Each of those sections says what changes, in a note set apart.

What came out to make room

The factory OS filled the machine's memory, so the new functions took the place of old ones, and so far ten have gone.

The lamp test, Catalog Functions code 99: the factory diagnostic that lights up the whole front panel. It was never printed in the listing anyway; you had to know the number.

14 Write SMPTE, the utility that stripes a timecode track onto tape. Striping tape is not something many people are still doing, and I asked someone who would know before touching it. Only the utility that writes the stripe went; following timecode went later, below.

23 Tx Sound Dump and 24 Rx Sound Dump, the pair that sends a sample down a MIDI cable and receives one back. MIDI Sample Dump moves a sound at about the speed of a fax. Nothing else on the machine uses it, and a sample comes off a floppy image in a second. Without its two menu entries the machine still answered a computer that asked for a sound or sent one, and a request that arrived in the middle of a song cut every sound and took over the screen to answer it. It ignores both now.

Format Disk, key 9 of the disk menu, together with the Copy Software page behind the same key. This build is for an SD card or a USB stick in place of the drive, and a blank disk image takes a second to make on a computer. The floppy driver stays, because the OS is read off the disk at every power-up and Save Seqs and Save Sounds still write to it. What goes is the menu function. The machine can no longer prepare a blank for itself, so a formatted blank has to be on the card already. Key 9 is the save described earlier.

13 Mem Remaining, the page that said how much sampling time and sequence memory were left. Sample Length, SAMPLE 5, shows the sampling time as well; the sequence figure is the part that is gone.

SYNC 3 and SYNC 4, the pages that slave the machine to SMPTE timecode and to an incoming click. Few people still lock a drum machine to tape or to a click track, and MIDI sync stays for everything else: the Sync page offers Internal and MIDI, and its keys 3 and 4 do nothing.

18 Swap Sounds, which traded two sounds throughout a segment: every hit of one played the other. I asked a few people who use the machine every day, and almost none of them had ever used it. Its room went to chopping a take, so that a hit lands whole in one pad.

21 Name Sound, where a sound is spelled one letter at a time with slider 1 and the arrows. It went once and came back, and went again for the grid in Step Program. A sound sampled from now on keeps the name of its pad, A1 or B6, and DISK 8 lists it so.

Every line that went is lifted out of the catalog too, so the listing has no gap to wonder about, and typing one of the retired numbers just redraws the page.

SET-UP 18, Decay/Tune Select, which made a sound's slider set its decay in place of its pitch, a pad at a time. Every sound keeps both now, and the Tune/Decay page sets the pitches and the decays, so 1 8 on Set-up does nothing.

12 Clear All Mem
15 Clear Snd Mem

17 Copy Sound   
19 Default Decay

20 Init DK/Tune 
22 Dynamic Alloc

22 Dynamic Alloc
25 Reverse Sound

   Disk [0-9]   
Save All?    y/n

To be continued