Korg R3 and Drum machine clock syncing Question/Problem

[Infinite-t]

Hi everyone, my wife and I are keyboarding noobs. I am a guitarist/bassist and she played KBs years ago. She just recently showed interest in playing again and likes techno/house/trance type music and wants to fiddle around making her own. I just bought her an R3 and an Alesis SR18 drum machine to get started.

The issue we are having is getting the tempo clock of the sr18 to sync with the r3. We have the cabling correct and followed the directions as best as we can. The midi channel is correct and the r3 is set to send and the drum machine set to recieve, but it seems the drum machine is not syncing it's tempo with the r3. Both of us have fiddled with it for hours and cant seem to get it working right. I think i had it working the other way around once buy swapping the cables around and changing some settings, i got the drum machine to tempo control the r3, but not the other way around.

Anyone have any ideas of what may be going wrong? Is having the R3 control the drum machine the best way to go? We dont have it hooked up to a computer right now or anything, she just wants to mess with it and get used to playing it and using the basic fuctions before she gets into more complicated stuff like that.

Thanks for any advice or help!

[skuppy]

Hi Infinite-t

treat the sr18 as the master
slave the r3 from the sr-18
unless you have a sequencer you have to slave your synth

For anyone else with SR-18 issues
This is the response from Alesis Support

The SR18 sync’s fine off of MIDI Beat Clock. Make sure you are sending MIDI Beat Clock from your other equipment to the SR18. If you are sending MIDI Time Code from your other equipment, this would be why you are having issues with the SR18 syncing.

One thing to consider, is the Motif rack(at least the one I have used) does not have a sequencer in it. You should ensure that your keyboard is sending a consistent sync and not only sending sync when playing a key. I think the most ideal setup for the limited knowledge I have on your setup would be to have the SR18 send sync to your other equipment.

To make sure you are turning sync on the SR18 properly do the following. On the SR-18 press the [System setup] and then press the [PAGE up] until you see “CLOCK IN OFF” (page 5). Next press the [INC] key (this if found directly to the right of the #5 and #0 keys) one time until “OFF” changes to “ON”. This setting allows the SR-18 to receive sync from other external equipment.

[Infinite-t]

Thanks for the info man. I'll give that a try and mess around some more. Thanks again.