Monday, October 5, 2009

Sync that DR-55

We are now on the working on producing the show from our new album. one of the songs uses arps, midi sequence and a boss dr-55 drumbox. If we want to make that song, we need to sync it with midi gear; the dr-55 is almost 30 years old you know...



The be able to do that, I looked at the external port that comes with the device:

DBS: on this port; we can see a analog tick at each 8ppq. Since the internal clock can be ridiculous fast, I've change it to a 48ppq!!!

CSQ: I don't know what this one does, it doesn't seems to output anything. according to what I've seen, it is supposed to be an output port for other roland gear (CSQ stands for Computer SeQuence). maybe this port is an input port, good for slaving the device ???

Foot switch: I've heard you can slave a Dr-55 with the foot switch, but it only seems to start/stop the sequence. quite useless to sync midi gear to my opinion.



Now, to be able to sync that device with midi, I wrote a simple max/msp application that reads the analog signal and then transform it into midi 0xF8 clock sync status byte. not perfect but it does the job. 30 years old and still young, like me???

max patch

No comments: