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

The worlds ugliest midi controller

Okay, this is my first electronic project. Maybe more practicing with the Dremel would have been better...

I needed a small midi device that I could put on my Nord Wave keyboard to control my Nord G2 Modular Rack on stage so I don't have to bring a computer to simply change the volume/change preset.

The arduino was a perfect fit for this since it can easily work with midi. The midi input is quite straight foward, a 6n138 octocoupler does the job. I took this advice and it worked perfectly: led midi controller. The arduino is pretty fast, I never lost a midi "byte" and it does repeat midi message without problems.



The only problem is that at first, I was trying to filter the midi message in the same function; if I got a midi 0x90 (note on) message, I was using

while ( Serial.available() == 0 );
byte2 = Serial.read();
while ( Serial.available() == 0 );
byte3 = Serial.read();

That solution didn't worked, I was loosing midi byte message and my filter process was waiting for a message that was already sent by the synth. The only solution I found is to process midi message with a buffer, so the Serial.available() was always executed in the arduino loop() function.

Now this code works. Now I really look amateur on stage.

source code