HELP!!!! MIDI from hell!
1999-12-12 by Hubble, Andrew John
I know this has been posted before by someone else, but its good to share. I have a couple of realy "I don't understand this at all" questions. 1) When I record a new song, everything is fine when I play it back normally, but if assign it to a "pad song" then sometimes, for no apparent reason (probably something I've done..... OK, definately something I've done) it plays back with a piano gm sound! If I change the midi channel the pad song returns to the correct drum loop, but after a while it might just decide (OK,OK, again I must have done something) to go off and be a piano again, but the main song stays as the original drums! 2) Even more obscure... when I play back a pre-recorded sequence whilst hooked up via midi to an external sequencer not only does the main song get started by the external signal, but also some odd impromptu GM sounds as well, the odd piano note or bell, a phone ringing, damn strange. Then when I stop everything and hit a pad, low and behold, the actual pad voices voices have changed to thes new odd GM sounds too! In my own pre-programmed kit too! but the display still told me the pads were triggering their old voices? boy something is realy screwed up right here. On a related note, the unit went through a period ( about half an hour) when if I stopped the main song manually ( whether started by midi signal or by hand) the brain would throw me to kit 40 immediately ( from kit 52 ). Am I going mad here? What is going on! A little backgroung on what I was doing may help. I had recorded a song, great, everything went well, except I couldn't work out how to make the brain memorise the kit I had used, but I don't think this is possible, I think the songs just play back with whatever kit you are using at the time. Now I assigned that song to a pad song on input 9, I noticed ( after a fashion) that this pad now triggered the song on channel 6, whereas the main song was on channel 10 along with the real time signals from the other pads. It took me half an hour of experimenting to discover how to make the pad song play back at a lower volume than the real time inputs. For information I had to change the volume of channel 6 in the song menu and the voice menu - these two menus seem to do the same thing, but then why are both there? I then found that by moving the pads off channel 10 I could control the playback volume of the main song too, without affecting the realtime input volume, this was great, just what I wanted. Then we noticed the odd incidental sounds, then the pad song began cross dressing as a piano, the whole world was tured upside down in seconds. Even after turning off all the channels for the voices and song, effectively muting the whole kit and the main song, there were still the incidental GM sounds, and they were comming from the brain, because when you unplugged the line out to the mixer the odd GM sounds dissappeared. Our keyboard player ventured that it was because the brain was reading all the midi channels being fed to it from the sequencer - which is also controling a sampler and eight-track - and suggested that there must be a way to make the brain only listen for certain channels or just stop and start commands. I'm no IDI guy, and the Reference manual reads like Latin,no actually I read Latin fairly well, like Portugese then , there's one language I don't stand a chance in. But the Basic guide doesn't even scratch the surface. Can anyone help me, please? It appears that the brain should work fine, I don't think anything is faulty as such, but I am soooooo stuck. Hope to hear from someone soon! Take care Andy