Please help! (midi)

[tchambeau]

Donald,
Thanks for the great info. Thats exactly what I want to start working on via the Motif. My unit is actually the original Motif 8, which is before they came out with the XS's. I have had it for 9 years but really only utilized the Voice mode, never utilizing any of the Midi or Song/Performance modes. I am a guitar player mostly, but have now been increasing my Keyboard skills. The Motif's menus and modes has always confused the hell out of me (judging by the Motfifator forum, I am not the only one lost) So I need to go and figure out the Performance and Pattern mode better.
Thanks Again
Todd

[DonaldM]

Originally Posted by tchambeau

Donald,
Thanks for the great info. Thats exactly what I want to start working on via the Motif. My unit is actually the original Motif 8, which is before they came out with the XS's. I have had it for 9 years but really only utilized the Voice mode, never utilizing any of the Midi or Song/Performance modes. I am a guitar player mostly, but have now been increasing my Keyboard skills. The Motif's menus and modes has always confused the hell out of me (judging by the Motfifator forum, I am not the only one lost) So I need to go and figure out the Performance and Pattern mode better.
Thanks Again
Todd

Todd, I didn't realize you had the original Motif. Still a great keyboard, no doubt. Some differences in functionality, but most of what I told would hold, I think. The main thing is to be sure to keep everything in sync...and I've found the easiest way to do that is to have the Motif slaved to PT for sync tempo, letting PT drive it. That way you can insert whatever tempo changes you want/need in PT and the Motif will just play right along in perfect sync!

Good luck. Once you get all this down, you'll be hooked!

One thing I do regularly is when I lay down an audio track in PT with a voice from the Motif, I also record a MIDI track of what I am playing. That way, I can use the PT midi editing functions to fix any mistakes, or just clean it up, and ALSO, it allows you to play back other voices using the same performance, so you can layer things up, OR just audition different voices for the same part and decide which is the keeper! I call it my "play once, record many" (PORM) tactic!

And you can copy the midi track to an instrument track and layer up with something from one of your VI's, like Xpand or Structure. You'd be surprised how fast you can get a full mix that way.

[tchambeau]

Donald,

Thanks Donald, yes the Motif/Protools combo looks to be like a great set-up once it is up and running. What you described above is exactly what I want to do.
The original Motif's manual is famously difficult to decipher. I am going to take some of your examples and finally link up the two, for hopefully what will be a seamless workstation. I will start a new thread within a week or so that will hopefully end up detailing every step to set-up the Motif to work within Protools and hopefully that will help some of the other Motif owners.
I want again to thank Flommer for all of his help getting my Midi up and running. I am unable to email or message him privately, so hopefully he reads this.

Todd

[DonaldM]

Good luck, Todd. I think once you get over the learning curve hump, you'll be having oodles of fun! And please, contact me if you have specific questions. If you haven't done so already, I would suggest you also visit the Motif forum over at Motifator.com Lots of really excellent help to be had their. They have individual forums for each version of the Motif series, so I'm sure you'd find other Motif/PT users.

I'm looking forward to upgrading to PT 9.0 and then using something like the Mackie Onyx 1640i mixer with firewire. Coupled with my XS, I'll be able to record up to 16 channels at once digitally, essentially going directly from the XS to PT. That will make things really fun!

[ozzlvlosis]

I had the same questions when I first hooked up my MOTIF with pro tools... all you have to do is have however many MIDI tracks you want as long as you have one aux track specifically for the motif. On my mbox2 my motif is inputs 3/4 so I would create an aux track with inputs 3/4... this is for the audio purpose so you can hear the sounds (as midi doesnt have sounds it's just data)

-also, i wasn't able to hear any sound for some reason while tracks were armed unless i went into OPTIONS>LOW LATENCY MONITORING

Once you get this setup it might be a good idea to save it as a template.

What i did was named that AUX track "Motif" with the inputs being 3/4 and now every time i open that template (which consists of a few instrument, MIDI, and bus tracks for EQ and VERB) it's already ready to go