MIDI: it's been said many times but...

[nursers]

... I love how things just work after so long. I dug my JV-1080 out of a cupboard this evening, did a factory reset and connected it to an Arturia controller. Works perfectly. Love it

[ElmerJFudd]

hardware

[Reezekeys]

And presumably, in a few more years when midi 2.0 gear & software is more prevalent, you should still be able to hook up that 1080, as well as an 1985-era DX7 without much trouble. Anyone try attaching a SCSI drive to their laptops lately? A centronics printer?

[Dr Mike Metlay]

hardware

AND software... as long as the platform is still relevant.

 

It"s strange to think that the huge museum exhibit celebrating the 30th anniversary of MIDI was so long ago now. They had a big layout of historical instruments at the NAMM show, inviting people to take a tour and learn about the history of the standard.

 

One of the things that the exhibitors were most proud of was a demonstration of a virtual instrument on an iPad (Animoog IMSC) being played by a MIDI sequencer running on a Commodore 64. The connection was via Sequential Circuits" MIDI interface for the C64"s card slot and a MIDI box hanging off the iPad"s Lightning port.

 

The earnest young man at the booth talked to me about what a great demonstration of longevity and stability of MIDI this was, demonstrating how even an ancient computer running a long-obsolete sequencer could still be useful controlling modern hardware. and look at the time span! 1986 to 2013, how could you beat that?

 

We had a long chat, following his surprise at the fact that I found the exhibit amusing but not terribly meaningful in practical terms. I agreed that it was a very impressive demonstration in principle, primarily because someone bothered to resurrect that moldy computer, find a floppy disk with the software on it, dig up a working interface card, and put it all together. But all that really demonstrated was someone"s willingness to wrench on old stuff for the sake of a visually interesting exhibit... not really the practical longevity of MIDI.

 

The kid was a college student barely out of his teens and still very much enamored of all this old gear, and he was curious to know what I meant. I explained to him that less than a month earlier, I had done a live concert where I had made practical use of MIDI"s longevity, with a multichannel MIDI sequencer on an iPhone driving my Oberheim Xpander. So I had done a concert using MIDI gear spread out over a wider time than what he was demonstrating (1984 vs 2013) and nary a second thought about how remarkable that was.

 

He blinked and hesitantly asked, 'Did it work okay?' and I said, 'Of course it did. Isn"t that kind of the point of this exhibit?'

[Dave Bryce]

hardware

 

dB

[nursers]

hardware

 

dB

 

That said, I turned the JV-1080 back on a few hours later and the internal battery is pretty much dead so need to factory reset everytime I turn it on until I replace the battery (which in this case is very simple thankfully).

[hardware]

I threw some 5 1/4' FDD"s into my ancient QX-1 to see what would work and was shocked the 384ppq that made me successful when I was a kid still rocked my new rig.

 

Just reassigned MIDI Channels and the old Mahavishnu, Weather Report, ELP stuff sounds so much better than Emulators and Roland S760s I used.

 

No idea about my SCSI HDD still works.

It"s a massive 1GB and the size of a shoebox.

 

If I had my PC and a WaveState with the QX-1 in 1985 I coulda been a contenda...

[stoken6]

I've never needed to operate 80s and modern gear simultaneously, but throughout my gigging career I've used the same MIDI protocol to connect 80s synths to 90s synths, then I've sold the 80s model and bought a millenial (MIDIed to the 1990s keyboard), and so on.

 

I've linked my 2011 Nord Stage 2 to:

- A 2007 board (Yamaha NP30)

- A 2005 board (Nord Stage Classic)

- A 2001 board (Viscount/Oberheim MC1000)

- A 1999 board (Alesis QS7.1)

- A 1995 board (Roland PC180)

 

Before I got the Nords, I used the Viscount or the Roland as controllers with the Alesis as primary sound source, and prior to that they linked to an Ensoniq SQ1+. My first MIDI Cable joined a Roland Juno-2 (1985) to a Yamaha EMT10 (1988)!

 

The cycle will slow down now, because 1. I don't particularly GAS for new boards and 2. 5-pin MIDI is an expensive luxury, with most budget boards going USB-MIDI instead.

 

Cheers, Mike.

[Anderton]

5-pin MIDI is an expensive luxury, with most budget boards going USB-MIDI instead.

 

I use an ESI MIDIMATE II for USB-to-5 pin and 5 pin-to-USB conversion. It's $35, but the only adapter I could find where I could play dense parts with polyphonic aftertouch into the adapter, turn off local control, send the adapter's MIDI out back into the keyboard's MIDI in (an Ensoniq TS-10), and not lose anything. I recommend it highly for getting old and new gear to play together.

 

I'd also add that one of the GREAT things about MIDI 2.0 is that is was prioritized to be backward compatible with MIDI 1.0. The MIDI-CI part of the spec is what allows for that. Because MIDI 2.0 is bi-directional, gear can carry on conversations with other gear...so a MIDI 2.0 keyboard controller can ask an expander module if it speaks MIDI 2.0. If the controller doesn't get an answer, it communicates to that module using MIDI 1.0. Pretty smart.

[ElmerJFudd]

hardware

 

dB

 

That said, I turned the JV-1080 back on a few hours later and the internal battery is pretty much dead so need to factory reset everytime I turn it on until I replace the battery (which in this case is very simple thankfully).

 

I did this on my JV-2080 not too long ago. Piece of cake. Battery from CVS. Properly sized Phillips screw driver. A little bit of a squeeze to pop old out and insert new one. Done. The JV"s are popular so easy to find replacement parts like a knob and there are actually nice screen replacement choices these days.

[nursers]

hardware

 

dB

 

That said, I turned the JV-1080 back on a few hours later and the internal battery is pretty much dead so need to factory reset everytime I turn it on until I replace the battery (which in this case is very simple thankfully).

 

I did this on my JV-2080 not too long ago. Piece of cake. Battery from CVS. Properly sized Phillips screw driver. A little bit of a squeeze to pop old out and insert new one. Done. The JV"s are popular so easy to find replacement parts like a knob and there are actually nice screen replacement choices these days.

 

Indeed - huge kudos to Roland for the battery set-up - a standard, widely available battery that isn't soldered in. Needs to be more of that

[Dave Bryce]

...and now, look - you guys talking about MIDI has made an MMA banner appear.

 

dB

[nursers]

We are here to serve Now while I think of it I have a question about where to buy Viagra .....

[stoken6]

5-pin MIDI is an expensive luxury, with most budget boards going USB-MIDI instead.

 

I use an ESI MIDIMATE II for USB-to-5 pin and 5 pin-to-USB conversion

.

Thanks Craig. I hate to challenge, but I believe that the ESI will connect 5-pin MIDI to a host, but not to a USB device. It will likely work with boards with USB host capability (Kronos, Mojo I think, some of the newer Yamahas), but you need something like a Kenton USB MIDI host - and another cable, and a PSU - to link a USB-MIDI-only board to a Nord, or Roland, or Kurzweil etc. That's my slight concern with MIDI 2.0 - it will encourage a proliferation of USB MIDI devices (not hosts), which can't interoperate with each other, only with a host device.

 

Cheers, Mike.

[felis]

hardware

 

Used to be - but nowadays too much hardware is rushed out the door with the intent to fix it later with updates.

 

Digital tech kind of mucked up everything.

[ElmerJFudd]

hardware

 

Used to be - but nowadays too much hardware is rushed out the door with the intent to fix it later with updates.

 

Digital tech kind of mucked up everything.

 

This is true, But there is a method in place for firmware updates. Before that we swapped ROMs.