Help with creating midi session :)

[tempest1226]

Hi there. I was wondering if someone would be generous enough to walk me through something. Tomorrow i am finally upgrading from 6.4 to 7.3 as well as upgrading my imac to 10.4 from 10.3. (Only way pt7 is compatable. Anyways. I figured i would post this early to give sometime for some hopefully, fast response. I am trying to hook up and setup a DR-670 boss drum machine. ALl i want to do is be able to use the sounds from the machine and manually pencil the actual drums in on the midi grid. I have read over and over how to do this and i got as far as have a midi track open, an aux track open, setting the ins and outs. I have the Dr-670 hooked up with the midi cables as well as 1/4 cable into input 1-2. The thing that im stuck on is that im seeing signal in the midi track, but im hearing no volume. Im kinda hoping maybe someone can start from the beginning and step by step walk me through the process with everything from wiring to what should be enabled to the actual setup/settings for the dr-670 and protools. Im really excited to get this rolling so any help with this would be awesome. thank you so much if you got through this and im sorry if its jumbled. Im a newbie with this stuff. thanks

[flommer]

Not familiar with the boss drum machine, but find out what you need to do for it to accept external MIDI as it's trigger source.

When you say you are seeing signal in the MIDI track, does that mean that it is being caused by notes that you are penciling in or from playing the pads on the drum machine?

The reason I ask is that if you want to trigger the boss from PT, then you should only need a MIDI cable going from ProTools-> out to the boss>-in.

What would be going on in this setup would be:

MIDI information is being created by the MIDI track in ProTools
It gets sent to the drum machine on a MIDI cable
The drum machine creates audio
The audio goes from the drum machine back into ProTools on the analog stereo cables in to an audio track or an Aux input

If the drum machine does not accept the external MIDI source then ProTools might send MIDI but the boss won't do anything with it.

If you have all that working (and you should be able to tell by listening to the boss with headphones) and still not hearing audio through ProTools, then something in your monitoring settings might not be right..

[tempest1226]

Hi there. I cant get any kind of response from the DR-670. When I pencil it in as well as hit the pads i get the midi signal and when i record it will even put down notes on the midi grid but when its time to play it back. I get nothing. As far as the boss Dr-670 options for midi, its pretty basic (as far as i know) Heres the options for Midi.

Sync mode which is where you would select for the Dr-670 to be the master or the slave
Options to choose from are AUTO, INT, MIDI.

Setting the Midi channel
The values are from 1-16. It says they have to match the transmitting and recieving devices must match

Setting Device ID
The values to chooose from are 17-32

The last is Buld Send and Recieve

These are the options from the Dr-670.

All i want to do is have it so that i can pencil in on the grid the notes with the sounds from the dr-670

[flommer]

I checked the dr670 manual on-line and its a little confusing, but it seems to imply that you have to be in MIDI mode by pressing <shift> and keypad 14. Once thats set then you need to have ProTools send MIDI on the same channel as the boss (drums) is set to receive. Channel 10 is commonly used for MIDI drums but any should work as long as its the same in both places.. It also seems that you can control the bass sounds at the same time, but you will need a different MIDI track in PT and use a different MIDI channel as well.

The sync mode shouldn't matter because that seems to deal only with transport and tempo sync, but you can try to put it into slave mode if nothing else works..

For testing purposes, you might try disconnecting the midi out on the boss. What you are trying to do has the boss as the receiver of MIDI info, not the sender and having both happening at the same time could confuse the situation..

[tempest1226]

I really appreciate everyones help with this and finally figured it out yesterday when i called boos's tech support (which is great by the way). The only thing i wasnt doing right was setting the channel to be the same channel the boss dr-670 was set to. The boss was on midi channel 16 and i had the midi track in protools set at channel 1. NEWBIE NEWBIE NEWBIE. haha. thanks everyone.