Pyramid will arrive in a day or two, and I’m wondering what will be the best way to link my synths, and avoid any known issues with synths I use.
If anyone is using some of the same synths, please let me know if there’s anything disagreeable between it and the Pyramid? Or anything going wrong in the daisy changing?
I have three options to link everything, A B and C below., which do you suggest for best performance?
Also, anyone using the Rev2 as the master keyboard? I’ll only be using the keys, not knobs.
As I’ll be using the Rev2 in dual midi mode, it will be receiving midi on 2 channels.
Anyone run into issues with this?
First things first. Sending MIDI messages thru a chain will delay the events. This is not that important when triggering synth sounds as a few ms late can be hidden inside the attack portion of the amp envelope (but very important when dealing with drum sounds).
And now for the bad news.
DSI (blessed be Dave) synths are notoriously difficult to be used as master keyboards.
This has been discussed on here, so I recommend you to look here.
Thanks for responding @mah I do have a midi quad thru, since I was using cubase and ableton previously, but there were too many issues syncing everything, especially transport syncing the elektron AR. Took some advice that the Pyramid would solve all that.
Thanks for responding @joosep Thanks for the link, I didn’t find that earlier. My issue is that I broke the Rev2 twice when I tried to control a Nord L4R and again the Minitaur. The only way to make it work again each time was to reload the firmware. So, that’s why I’m reaching out here for some wisdom concerning Rev2 & Pyramid relationship.
i think a lot of this is going to be ‘suck it and see’, since theoretically any of your proposals will work.
so just connect everything up, and see whats working, and fix issues you come across.
(its easier if you come back here to report specific issues, rather than everyone trying to guess what issues you might have)
as others have said, id go with a midi splitter rather than using thru, but both should work (latter may just incur latency, an issue if midi clock is important)
also keep an eye out for this product being released
ive got a beta unit, and I have to say its excellent, and ideal for sorting out exactly these kinds of setups.
basically it can act as a customisable midi splitter / merger , but its intelligent, so can start modifying/filtering/converting midi messages if some if your hardware is problematic. ideal companion to the pyramid imho.
i dont know release date or price, but beta is ending soon, and afaik, no major issues have been found so hopefully it wont be long before its released.
hey, admittedly I haven’t read everyone’s proposals here. I do have a rev2, and while I don’t use mine as a controller I have a nord I use similarly to how you’ve proposed to use your rev 2. I had a couple of notes on your design, though most of it looks good to me.
When it comes to using a synth as a controller - you’ll just want to make sure you can turn local off. If you can do this automatically on whatever synth, then that’s the synth i’d choose.
The real feedback I wanted to give what on your daisy-chain vs splitter midi setup. First, every midi thru you use is going to introduce a latency. Depending on how midi thru has been implemented this latency can be lesser or more. As a result, what I would do for minimal latency would be to use the splitter directly off the pyramid and hook each of your synths to that, this could include your rev 2 (it doesn’t need to be on it’s own midi bus to be your controller).
Fwiw, usually even two midi thru’s won’t introduce a latency that you notice I just like to set this up from the get go. Even using splitters I have some daisy chaining in my setup and it does fine.
Re your use of the two midi buses - I do use both my buses to split up the data, mostly to reduce things like clock jitter to devices sensitive to that sort of thing. Your setup looks basic enough, unless you’re really CC happy, you might consider the one splitter for all of your midi devices as I mentioned above.
If you intend on expanding in anyway, get a MIDI router/patchbay over a splitter. As everyone here seems to agree, get an iConnectivity box if you are going to buy new. I use and recommend the MIO4.
