A request came in to add a shortcut section, so I added an Appendix G and tried to organize it in a way that made more sense to me than what information is in the official manual.
https://neartao.wordpress.com/2022/05/13/roland-sp-404-mk2-guide-v0-23/
If anybody has been wondering where the updates have been for the guide, well I've partly been lazy, I have been trying to figure out how to improve the YouTube videos for the mk2, and well I went on vacation. The vacation was with my family, we drove about 1200 or so miles to get down to North Carolina, and I had a lot of fun at both the Ocean Isles Beach, and then we spent a day in South Carolina at Myrtle Beach. I did bring the mk2 with me, and was able to spend the first day with my nephew showing him a bit about the mk2, but he is more interested in his iPad and using Garage Band at this time. We had fun, but beyond that I hardly touched the mk2. Not for lack of trying, but it was a lot of driving, keeping friends and family entertained, cooking, and at the end of the day just being tired. I'm hoping I'll get some more time in July with the mk2 on my trip to Brazil with my family... fingers crossed.
Honestly I hadn't been sure what to do next with the guide. I've had a few ideas, but nothing that felt like it was worthwhile enough to sit down by itself for. Somebody posted on discord a few days ago about the lack of a good Shortcuts guide, and that gave me the idea to just write up a few pages for how it would make more sense to organize to me. What I have so far isn't perfect, but you can at least see shortcuts for Sample Mode, Pattern Mode, DJ Mode, Effects, and Settings. There were a few things in there that I realized I missed as well, so it will be a good exercise to keep adding to the shortcuts (or just a straight up commands) section, but also to drive that information back into the rest of the guide as well.
I also had been sitting on a few notes I had written down from people reaching out to me for other things, so you might see your name as a shout out in the guide if you happened to look around. Above that, I decided it was also time to just start scrubbing through all the ???s I had left around. I've learned a lot more about the mk2 over the last several months from when I started, and figured it was time to start answering questions for real. That brought me down from about 120 ??? to 71 ??? I believe was the last count. Some of them will take some legitimate time to setup and run experiments, but a lot of it I believe is still worth digging into.
The last, rather minor detail, is I decided I am going to start replacing some of the image content with vector graphics. Do I technically need to save space on the file? Not really, but I also have been seeing the file size continue to grow rather rapidly into something that I could see getting a bit out of control. As a result, I'll probably just keep designing little symbols for a bit to get the file size back under control, and then I can save the images for things that actually deserve more detail, or aren't just copy/pasted throughout the document.
I suppose all of this is a long way to say, I am still around, I am still taking input from the community, and I do still want to get folks the best information possible.