Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label MIDI

Using a Raspberry Pi as a MIDI USB/5-pin bridge

In my constant... need... to get everything music instrument related to communicate with each other, I wanted to look into ways to get some of my keyboards/synths with only MIDI over USB to talk to devices with regular good old-fashioned 5-pin MIDI ports from the eighties. Cables! First I had a quick look at off the shelf solutions. The most interesting one being the Kenton MIDI USB Host – providing MIDI host functionality for USB devices as well as regular MIDI in and out in a small box. Unfortunately it is rather expensive (~125 €) and a reliable online source warned me that it was not entirely stable in collaboration with my OP-1, so I started thinking of more... home-grown solutions. I decided to try to use my old Raspberry Pi and see if that would serve as a USB host with a borrowed MIDI USB adapter. (Thanks Simon.) A cheaper, and, as an added boon, a nerdier solution. Step 1: Get the USB MIDI device up and running This was the easy part. The device I have been lent ...

MIDI channels in Cubase - or there, and back again

The other day a friend and I experimented with connecting his excellent monotribe (with the miditribe extension) to my Cubase to see if we could record the MIDI-signals coming from it. For Science! This made me realize that, being a MIDI-noob, I hadn't understood how MIDI worked in Cubase, and none of my google searches seemed to help either, since being a MIDI-noob, I probably didn't have the right vocabulary to specify the searches with. The thing is that the 'tribe is supposed to send the synth MIDI on CH 1 and the drums on CH 10. We added two midi tracks in cubase and selected the channels we wanted in the track info. Like so: This did not work, as we got a mix of drums and synths at once all over the place. Interesting, but not right. To try to understand this we created a default project with 16 MIDI tracks, one per channel, and lo and behold all MIDI was sent to all channels. OK. We figured we needed to filter out just the channel needed per channel so we ad...