Blokas Midihub

This thing is more complicated than I thought. It’ll take a couple rounds to get the hang of it. But the possibilities seem pretty wide, even though the interface seems simple.

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Digitakt is my Master and my Main MIDI Sequencer for all my Synths :

DT Out > Kenton Thru-5 In
Kenton Thru-5 Thru’s > to my Synths MIDI Ins

The thing is that DT doesn’t pass AT, MW or PB from my external Keyboard (Hydrasynth) :

Hydrasynth MIDI Out > DT MIDI In

My question : Is there a way to use the Midihub to accomplish this task (passing AT, MW and PB to my Synths) and keep DT as my Master? If so, how?

Your lights will be well appreciated, thanks.

I just got my MidiHub, so I’m still figuring it out but I don’t see why not?

You’d have the DT and Hydra as Midi In A and B, and your synths (including I guess the Hydra) on Midi Out A, B, C, and D.

You’d create a pipe from Midi A (DT) to Virtual Pipe A, and then another pipe from Virtual Pipe A to each individual Midi Out. You could even add a filter so that only specific channels are going to specific Midi Outs if you’d like.

You’d also create another pipe with a clock, start, stop, and other sync features coming from Midi A and going to Virtual Pipe A as well.

That should get your Digitakt controlling everything, and you can then add different filters and Midi effects for each of the different Midi Outs as you’d like.

Finally you’d create another pipe, Midi In B (the Hydra) to Midi Out, and just select the Midi Out port you’d like. Since most parameters can be controlled by Midi CC, you could even program a Midi track on your DT to select where the Hydra goes to, or create different versions of your patch and save the onto the MidiHub, and use the button to scroll through them.

At any rate, yes, it’s possible with like 20 minutes of programming I think.

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Thanks for your fast reply. I already tried this avenue but with the Kenton Thru-5 between the Midihub and the Synths. It didn’t work. Maybe the programming was wrong, though.

Midihub Out A > Kenton MIDI In > Kenton MIDI Thru’s to the Synths

Do you see a reason why this doesn’t work?

The MidiHub is great but a little finicky and not always super intuitive for as powerful as it is. Honestly you probably just set it up wrong. Took me a while to get my setup working properly to just send clock and start/stop out.

It may take a minute to program or troubleshoot, but it is possible.

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I don’t have a digitakt, but it sounds like you’re focusing on the wrong thing here. I searched this forum and found this answer between your own posts in this digitakt MIDI thread.

Take the OUT from your keyboard OR your digitakt THRU and put that into midihub alongside digitakt OUT. Merge the streams as you need with filter pipes, taking care to prevent duplicate messages.

@hyperstationjr in this situation you would not need to create another pipe with clock, MIDI clock and transport messages should be passed directly from the digitakt, just like with a direct MIDI connection. Otherwise you will be duplicating clock messages and that will for sure screw things up.

That thing is tempting…
I thought I was going to get away with a simple midi thru 5…
Synths keep coming in…
So that should be a wise purchase I believe.

@Electromatic sorry for the hold up on that patch! It’s not anywhere near as versatile as I imagined at the time, due to not being aware of how some of the current pipes work. I’ll throw it up on here with a more detailed explanation soon, I promise.

@Tchu sorry for not reading properly I feel like I just parroted @hyperstationjr a bit there. If you’re having trouble download a MIDI monitor like this one, then use a loopback on your hub to see what’s coming out of it. Can help a lot with debugging setups.

Like I said I’m still pretty new to the environment, but I had issues with clock-based effects (like repeat, arp, etc) if I didn’t specifically include a clock element.

Given the very specific setup requested I guess it’s not needed but I just found if I was playing around with things and didn’t specify a clock source, it would stop the data from flowing and I’d just have to do it anyway.

Weird, my experience is pretty much the opposite. I imagine it’s quite dependent on the gear involved.

Very strange but not unexpected. It’s a great piece of gear and they keep working on improving it, but the documentation is a little lacking, and the forum isn’t nearly as active as this one for instance. Even the patch archive is a little light, but hopefully with time that all improves.

I found the Idea of Midihub pretty tempting, but somehow I can’t get my head around this thing.
I find it really hard to convert my Ideas into pipes…

For example I wanted to create a program, that does some kind of midi sidechain.
Like: every time “note on” for C3 on Midi channel 1 (Kick-Drum) comes in, send out a low CC to other channels to lower the volume of the other synths.
No Idea how to set this up…

I found having a coding background really beneficial to understanding the pipe workflow. The implementation is still pretty clunky so it can be hard to see how everything fits together.

Here’s the basic building blocks for your suggestion:
sidechain

Filter midi channel 1 -> Filter note on -> Filter C3 -> transform C3 into CC message

side_chain.mhp (137 Bytes)

Probably worth reading up on the LFO too, though I haven’t explored that yet.

If there’s one thing you should know, it’s that filters are probably the most important thing. It’s your way of isolating messages from one another, allowing you to do stuff like “if this, then that.”

It’s also important to note that no messages are dropped unless you explicitly do it, so every time you pipe something EVERYTHING gets copied. Unless you are careful you’ll end up with a load of copies of the same messages cascading one after the other.

I really recommend using a midi monitor to take a peek at what’s getting spat out, and playing around with the pipes while it’s hooked up. That’s the best way to get an understanding of what the pipes are pumping out.

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It’s like on a synth, an Arp needs a Clock to be trigged (played).

No worries, Merv. I’m trying to figure out how the pipes work myself. I think Blokas used reverse Polish notation when designing the box. :slightly_smiling_face:

Bring back RPN !

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Kinda tempted by this, seems like a useful utility device to have around. At some point I want to tackle hooking up as much of my gear as possible to the computer with a single clock source, and this seems like it could be quite handy, though I’ve not thougth about exactly how I’d use it.

Is it possible with this to take clock from one input and send it to all the outputs, mixed with other MIDI data coming either from inputs or USB? I can do this with my iConnectAudio (but the interface to do so is hell!)

I’m selling mine, I used literally once.

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