Basic MIDI Connection questions

Forum for MC-808
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berlinguy
Posts: 2
Joined: 22:47, 30 May 2011

Basic MIDI Connection questions

Post by berlinguy »

Hello All

I am a complete novice to EM although I have loved the stuff ever since I first heard Tangerine Dream back in the 70's. I have been lucky enough to have been given an MC-808 which is used in conjunction with Ableton Live - an APC40 - and E-mu Xboard49 keyboard and a couple of Korg Nano MIDI devices to try and recreate the Berlin School of EM hence my username.

Regarding setting up the keyboard to the MC-808 question 1

What I am trying to do is control the Roland unit with my E-mu keyboard.

is it necessary to connect both the MIDI cables and the USB cable or is it one or the other.

2 My very basic understanding of MIDI says that both the sending device and the receiving device must be on the same MIDI channel, but I do not see any setting on the MC-808 whereby the MIDI channel is selected.

Thats all I need to understand for now, so if some kind person could enlighten me, I would be very grateful.
I suspect that as I become more familiar with this equipment and my knowledge grows, I will have more questions, hopefully not as basic as these. Thank You
Robert13
Posts: 11
Joined: 13:09, 25 May 2010
Location: Netherlands
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Re: Basic MIDI Connection questions

Post by Robert13 »

Hello Berlinguy,

I use my MC-808 in combination with a Roland PCR-500 and a M-Audio O2. I use it in a live setup and at home.

1)
At home I have alle quipment connected to my PC over USB and I use Ableton as DAW. But to test all connections you can useMidi-OX (http://www.midiox.com/)

In the live setup I use a controller (PCR-500 of O2) with a direct connection to my MC-808 by a midi cable.

2)
On your Em-U you can select a midi channel of select OMNI. You can setup the MC-808 to use OMNI (probable to set remote keyboard to ON, but look into the manual) of select a midi channel of the mc-808 manually, like selecting a channel that you wat to alter with the realtime controlls.

I hope this will help you a bit.

Robert
berlinguy
Posts: 2
Joined: 22:47, 30 May 2011

Re: Basic MIDI Connection questions

Post by berlinguy »

Hello Robert

Thank you for your reply and advice. As with many other things I presume there is more than one way to accomplish what I want, and after 3 days of continual patching repatching cables and setting different paramaters on the MC-808, I have managed to get it working as I want it, although maybe not in the correct or most efficient manner. Like your home studio, I dispensed with the MIDI connectors and used USB throughout. One of the additional problems is that the E-mu keyboard comes with a software package called Patchmix (software mixer) which is installed with the driver and in order to get Ableton to control the output of the MC-808 it involved setting up inserts on the Patchmix so that the audio came from the 808 into Patchmix out of that into Ableton out of that back into Patchmix and finally into the soundcard. So thank you for your advice, now that I have got it working and written down, I will give your method a go.

Kind Regards

Peter (Berlinguy)
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