Thanks to Morningstar Engineering’s online resources, the user forum transcripts, the active participation of so many caring, patient and experienced MCx and Midi users and, of course, James, over the last year or so I have grown from a midi newbie to a not-so-cocky advanced novice. I’d like to give myself more credit, but with all its variables, permutations and seemingly endless applications, MIDI is singularly cruel in its ability to repeatedly drag me down a six-hour long problem-solving rabbit hole only to reveal how stupid I was six hours earlier. Yes, the “clues” and, if you’re lucky, the exact answers are out there, but to exhume them from the myriad crevices of the internet one really needs a PhD in Search Engine Phrase Formulation.
Case in point: After rearranging my midi cables to check the firmware status of my Strymon Pedals (another peeve I’ll save for Strymon), I thought I had restored everything to its previous state. But NO CLOCK! I could send cc and pc messages to my pedals but the BPM did not display and was not being sent to my pedal board via the omniports. So, I began the long process of checking and rechecking EVERYTHING (I thought).
Six hours into the process I began typing in this forum to ask for help. But then I remembered something James said in one of the dozens and dozens of threads I read–“The MC8 has 7-pin midi sockets and most midi cables have 5 pins,” and that could cause problems (this was abstracted from a non-clock-related post). So, even though I had checked the insertion point between the MC8 7-pin socket and the 5-pin cables last night by ensuring the bottom and top were aligned. It wasn’t enough.
I just made micro rotation adjustment of the cables and voila! (Or, rather, damn!!!) The cables are in perfect alignment and the clock has been restored to my board. There is no cathartic sense of jubilation: There is only abject frustration over having wasted so much time over something so basic.
So, if you haven’t already experienced this, you might want to add it toward the top of your problem-solving routine when things just aren’t working as they should.
Cheers!
Bill