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Kenny Segal

Gazillion Industries · September 20, 2026

Most producers who get called an SP-404 user are describing a sampler. In this case the machine is closer to a pedalboard: live drums, played in a room, running out through a cheap box of effects and back in again, until the recording stops sounding like a recording.

Kenny Segal is a Los Angeles producer best known for his records with billy woods — Hiding Places in 2019 and Maps in 2023 — and for work with R.A.P. Ferreira, Armand Hammer, Open Mike Eagle and Busdriver. His method is built around live musicians playing over samples, and the SP-404 sits in that chain as a processor rather than as the thing the beat is made on. His own description: start with the sample, get a vibe, then have people come and play on top of it.

The short version

The 404 as an effects unit

The clearest public document of how he uses the machine is a sample pack he put out in 2017, because one of its folders is labeled for exactly what it contains: live drums processed through SP-404 effects. Not drums sequenced on a 404. Drums played, recorded, and then run through the box for what it does to them.

The same pack includes a circuit-bent Omnichord, a hacked toy sampler, and a folder of vinyl noise, tape hiss and field recordings. That is a fair picture of the palette: acoustic sources and broken electronics, with a cheap sampler's effects as the glue. If you want to know what the 404's ancestors did to audio in that role, our piece on the SP-303 covers it, and the SP-404 story covers how the line got there.

Sampling the spaces between the notes

That phrase is his, and it is the most useful idea in his published method. Ableton put out a breakdown of his approach in 2017 with a downloadable session, and the structure is revealing: each drum element sits on its own arrangement track rather than in a clip, so that any individual hit can be muted, reversed or pitched on its own.

What that gives you is not a loop with variations. It is a performance you can edit at the level of the single hit, which is why his drums breathe in a way programmed drums usually do not and why they never quite repeat. The spaces are the material: the bar of room tone between two phrases, the breath before a horn line, the decay nobody else kept.

Gazillion Industries makes plugins for records built this way, where the room and the noise are the content rather than the problem.

The room, from the people in it

Musicians who have recorded there describe a Rhodes, a Casio CZ-101, a polyphonic Moog, a spread of pedals, and a microphone and preamp collection good enough that one of them singled out how clear the drums came back. They also describe him working the controls during takes rather than afterward, which fits everything else about the method: the processing is part of the performance, not a stage that happens later.

Small practical detail worth stealing: on at least one record the guitars went straight in, with no amplifier. A guitar direct into a chain of samplers and pedals is a different instrument from a guitar in front of a speaker, and on the right record it is the better one.

Why the records sound like that

Hiding Places and Maps are rap records where the instrumental rarely behaves like a beat. The loops drift, the drums arrive late or not at all, and there are long passages where what is holding time is a musician rather than a grid. That is a direct consequence of the working order: if the sample comes first and the players come second, what you end up with is a performance of a loop rather than a loop with performances on top.

It is also the opposite of the dominant approach, where the grid is fixed first and everything is fitted to it. Both produce good records. They produce different kinds.

Questions people ask

What does Kenny Segal use?

A home studio in Los Angeles with a reported cache of SP-404s, a Rhodes, a Casio CZ-101, a polyphonic Moog, pedals, and a good microphone and preamp collection. He plays Omnichord and a Bastl MicroGranny on record.

How does he use the SP-404?

Mostly as an effects processor on material played live, rather than as the sequencer. His own sample pack documents live drums run through the machine's effects.

What is his production process?

In his words: start with the sample, get a vibe, then bring musicians in to play over it. The drums are then edited at the level of individual hits, each on its own track.

What records should I start with?

Hiding Places with billy woods (2019) and Maps (2023). Then the work with R.A.P. Ferreira, Armand Hammer and Open Mike Eagle.

What to take from it

Two things. Put the processor in the performance rather than after it: if a cheap sampler's effects are going to be on the drums, run the drums through them while people are playing and commit. And treat every hit as editable rather than every bar: a kit on separate tracks, where one snare can be reversed or dropped, is a different instrument from a loop.

The machine everyone associates with him was never really the point. The players in the room were.

Keep reading

• The SP-404 and the sound of Los Angeles — How a cheap sampler its makers underestimated became the instrument of LA's beat scene.
• The SP-303 and the vinyl sim sound — What the 2001 sampler was, what its Vinyl Simulator does, and who used it.
• J Dilla — The life, the machines, how the drums really work, and the claims that do not hold up.

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