Help!!! So I’m a keyboard player that has experience with older keyboards such as Roland D-50, D-20, Juno-106 and others. I’ve always connected them together with midi cables to Be able to layer sounds from each of them but that was 25 years ago. Now I currently have in my set up a Roland Fantom X-7, Nord Electro 2, Korg Wavestation EX, and a Roland A-30. I also have a Windows PC with a bunch of softsynths from Korg, Arturia, OP-X Pro II, and Native Instruments Komplete control w/Kontakt 5. I have a Behringer UMCHD 204 Audio/Midi interface and a MOTU micro lite 5x5 midi interface. I also have an old MX-8 midi patchbay too but that’s not being used at the moment. So what my dilemma is that I want to incorporate my laptop with all the soft synths into my hardware synth setup so I can use some of the sounds on my pc on my hardware synths but I’m not sure how to connect all these together and what software I would need to make this happen. I have a program by Brainstorm called Forte 4 that I’ve been experimenting with but don’t really know how to use it too well. My ultimate goal is to be able to use my laptop as a midi sound module like a rack mount of synth modules but I can’t figure out how to get it all connected and operating together. Anyone have any ideas?
I'm intrigued by one of your comments. You mention you hope to "use some of the sounds on my PC (from soft synths) on your hardware synths".
How are you planning to do that? The software synths are a quite different 'kettle of fish' to any hardware synth, although there could be cases where both systems use sample data, and that data may use a format which might be compatible and transferrable, but usually the sample data would be part only of the final sound.
Otherwise, it would be possible to use your laptop (and soft synths, etc) as if they were sound modules and create a system using the two sound sources side by side. Could have useful benefits regarding overlays etc. You would just need to set up the various devices so that they responded to specific midi channels, and mix the various audio outputs together to give the final result. I'm not sure that you mention some sort of AUDIO mixer mind you?
Geoff
Yes I have a Mackie 8 channel powered mixer that all my equipments is plugged into. The latency is pretty much zero so using the laptop to layer and split on my hardware synths especially the Fantom and A30 is what I’m trying to accomplish but connecting everything is what I’m having the issue with. Especially the A-30.
Jaye,
What is the problem regarding the A-30? Are you setting these to use different channels to other devices. Is the A-30 doing something it should not, or is it not doing something it should?
Geoff
Actually the problem with the A-30 is I cant seem to get the pitch bender to work and what I wanted to do is use the A-30 for mostly the soft synths but I also want to send some of the other soft synths to the other boards as needed. Just not sure how to configure it all with the midi cables and which ports to use and how to incorporate the midi interface and the audio interface into all of it as well. My audio interface has a midi in and out as well. All other boards have a midi in, out, and thru.