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Topic starter
I need some help and guidance here please.
I want to be able to select and change sound preset / programs on my keyboards from an external hardware device rather than the actual keyboards program selectors themselves. Reason this I get visits from the kids / grandkids and they want to keep flipping through the various sounds, back and forth (too many times!). This happens with all of my keyboard, so I thought to make it easier for them and to reduce the risk of the grandkids, partcularly, 'grinding' the preset selectors to death, if the program sections could be done with an external controller via midi.
I have seen this approach in a couple of YouTube videos where it looks like preset selections are being done with a midi device 'Sipario MIDI Router'. I've looked at the website for the router but I'm not clear if this would be the right solution for my problem, it looks to have very interesting capabilities but at the same time quite expensive. (website below):
Sipario - Advanced MIDI Router
So here's the question; does anyone have any ideas about this or any exerience with the Sipario MIDI Router or any other similar device. I really want to accomplish this task with a separate hardware device, not a PC / Mac based solution (this would just cause more problems with the grandkids).
Just another thought, could I perhaps achieve the preset / program changes with an iPad app??
Any help, guidance, ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Posted : 06/04/2018 9:14 am
It looks like it will likely do what you want. Note that if your grandkids do something extreme like remapping MIDI input channels on your keyboards, you still will have to go back to your keyboards to fix it.
For me, I use BomeBox with a Bome MIDI Translator Pro software to do this. develop what I want to do on MIDI Translator Pro on my PC and then upload my project file to BomeBox. I then have my own third party controllers (in my case I use Behringer FCB1010) to control all translation, routing, PC's etc.
BomeBox is around 200 EURO
MT Pro is around 80 EURO
FCB100 I think is around 150 EURO but I got mine used and much cheaper.
Most of my MIDI devices are USB enabled so I use a USB Hub off of my BomeBox. It has one DIN in and out port so you might need to get some sort of usb to DIN hardware if you need to convert for your keyboards.
You can probably get a discount on the Bome Stuff if you let them know you will be ordering both the software and the BomeBox.
I don't have grandkids (yet), but my plan would be just to get a cheap keyboard for them to play with and have them leave the other stuff alone. They can probably have a lot of fun with a cheap Yamaha keyboard for under 100 EURO.
Posted : 06/04/2018 2:16 pm
Topic starter
Steve, many thanks for your response. I've manage to get hold of the Bome Box products and have worked out a scheme to use these for the program changes. I've also managd to get a couple of iPad apps, working with a Yamaha bluetooth midi interface, to select and make program changes on my DSI Rev 2 successfully. The next part of the 'challenge' for the grandkids is to also to be able to select and change program banks as well as the individual programs themselves. The Rev 2 for instance has 4 banks of 100 presets, I can manualy select a bank and then select any of the 100 presets within that bank. What have been unable to figure out is to how to select and change the program banks via midi. I have tried to capture the midi traffic data, via an iPad app, to determine / understand the midi message being used / transmiited by the physical keyboard program selector encoder. So far from what I'm seeing from the app is difficult to read and understand. My question here is do you have any idea of the midi CC's etc. that would be used to make the program bank changes. Any ideas here would be appreciated.
Posted : 21/04/2018 8:29 am
