Super Lo Fi

Super Lo-Fi and limiting sampler, but it has a lot of charm that just makes you fall in love with it. I originally started searching for one of these when I listened to cLOUDDEAD as a teen, and feel in love with the bit crushed pads they had going on. You admittedly can't do much on these things, the most you can do when editing a sample is using a "mark" button to mark the start and stop points. No individual control of pitch, volume or anything like that, what you record in is mostly what your stuck with. However where this thing shines is the actual sampling part of it, it is already a tinge Lo-Fi on its standard setting but you can go down 3 more lower quality sample rates. Lo-Fi 1 is probly the best middle ground if you want that bit crush sound, I find Lo-FI 2 to have a bit to much volume drop and artifacts.

The effects are not that robust but each of them sounds great, the pitch is extremely nice sounding, super fluid and just works. It's not like the SP-404's pitch where it re-pitches how a guitar pedal would, and I'm glad it is not like that. The filters are quite nice, and when using them on a live input add a slight crackle that is really nice if you like that texture. I'm not quite sure how they implemented the delay on this unit but it sounds kinda odd, and it doesn't seem to ring out after the sound plays unless you are holding the pad down. You can mess with the knob as you are playing a sample to get all sorts of beautiful digital glitches, and for that reason it's probably the effect I use the most other then pitch. The time stretch and ring mod are okay, and I personally don't use them that much, but when I need them I'm glad to have them.

The major downside to this is that you can only store 8 sounds with out the smart media card, which at this point are about as hard to find and expensive as the sampler it self. And with those 8 sounds you don't get much overall sample time. I think it's this reason why you will see a lot of people say you cant make a full track on one of these, and personally i disagree. You can get a long way by just playing a sample loop and a drum break with this thing, and if you started multi-tracking or other stuff you could get extremely far, but because its an SP, people expect it to have that work flow. However there is nothing wrong if you just want to use this thing as something to color your samples and then work with them on a more capable sampler, it really has a lot of character in it. Don't buy this thing thinking it's going to be an SP-404. But I can't imagine a time where I would want to get rid of this thing, it does what it does in a way I love. These things are going up in price however, and honestly if it goes above 200$ I would stay away, its just to simple of a device to pay that much money for.

I will warn that if you are not careful with your gain staging you will get a nasty high pitch whine of sorts, you need to record into this thing a bit hot. I've heard that this can also be helped if you use batteries but I've had a lot of success just recording a bit louder into it so I've never tried that.

cool, lofi, sketchy, but horrendously limited, thats why I like it...

a bit hard to sample guitars, but in some sort of its own way, it works...

Preferred Settings + Usage:

From Gear Setup

Portable sampler!

The Boss Dr Sample 202 was supposedly designed for loops and DJ's on a budget. It's a big brick of plastic! It offers four low quality sample rates, from 31 to about 4 kHz, providing 20 to 260 seconds of sample time via built-in microphone, Mic or Line inputs. Each Pad to which you assign your samples can have user-selectable sampling rates in order to maximize sample time. It has six built-in effects including Pitch Shift, Filter 1 & 2, Time Stretch, Delay, and Ring Modulation.All really fun to play with! An innovative BPM function calculates the BPM from the sample length for easy loop/BPM syncing. The sampler can be battery powered, and originally came with lots of sampled loops and one-shots to get you going.

This was always a fun and easy to use sampler! I once even sampled one of our friends talking in their sleep with it! I loved that it was portable and easy to use. You can still find them on Ebay every now and then but dont count on much sample storage (even with the hard to find 5v SD card). I really liked that you could run any audio into it via RCA connections and use the filters and such. Fun to have around if you can find it for cheap! Not a bad little sampler at the time it was issued.

tool

cool sampler. to be used as a tool rather than to make music on (there's no sequencer, or resample function) - you can still make beats on this though;) imo - no need to get a memory card. the effects get limited when using the card. lofi is VERY lofi, don't get it for that only though.

my left hand

weapon of choice, sharp and accurate. my wakizashi

The Only Thing you Truely Need

Does it suck? yea. IS it super limited? yea. Is it perfect? oh yes.

god sampler

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deep inside

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great sound

if you`re into hiphop or some heavy drums, just grab one