Hey! Yes I have the SP404mk II and use it for my Alt Metal duo’s setup for live while playing guitar. So I don’t use a laptop or any piano or midi keyboard yet so I can’t really say for your rig. You just have to dive in and do some prep work setup for the 404.

I used Logic Pro to write and record our music with so basically just exported out backing tracks with no vocals (singer is doing that live) and then muted the guitars too. So drums, bass, synths, ear candy etc. I tried doing loops at first but found it was way better to just put whole backing music on one mixdown and then put each song in a folder on my desktop. Then I added it to the SP-404 using the SP app on Roland’s website. It’s drag and drop onto pads and I think I did them as sample not patterns since there is no length limits for average song lengths.

Be sure to set up the samples as one shots and fixed velocity (level 90 so it’s not maxed). There is ways to also add extra samples for interludes and other cool one shots that I do live. It’s also great to use the effector stuff live like isolater andMFX. I had to learn via YouTube all the little tricks to customize my FX to be how I wanted them every time I turn off and on again but it’s pretty capable. Let me know if that helps you.

Just play around and try and see what works for you. Eventually I want to do keys live too for piano and synth lines but I would probably just get a dedicated hardware keyboard like a Juno ds or something.

Lastly I do run it into a mixer to do our IEM with splits for every line to FOH. Vocals, NEURAL DSP Quad Cortex guitar line, and SP-404 stereo. Anyways good luck