Midi Problems Galore

[sutekh]

I'm controlling my Kross with an Alesis Vortex keytar and while I think some of the horrendous problems I'm having come from the Vortex, I am almost certain some of them stem from the Kross.

I hate to bad-mouth my favorite keyboard of all time but it's doing some really terrible STUPID things.

Here's the latest- I have a combo with a synth sound for most of the song, and a solo sound on Midi channel 2 so I can switch sounds from the keytar as I play live. Tonight, the sound on channel 2 transposed itself a whole step higher for no apparent reason and could not be reset even after doing a master reset of the keytar.

But the sound isn't transposed in the Timbre-Pitch menu of the Kross. So what exactly happened? This happened several times. I can't have this happen in a live gig!

I wish the Kross had Global filters for each type of control, so I could disable everything but the bend wheel- but it doesn't. It has one check box for all controllers. Which is stupid.

I've seldom used MIDI before because it's proven totally unreliable in the past, just like it is now. I though after 30+ years that programmers would be good at designing MIDI devices by now.

Attn programmers: you may enjoy wrestling with something for hours to make it do a simple task, but I do not. And even if I did, am I supposed to stop the whole concert for several hours just to wrestle with some poorly-documented setting buried in an obscure menu somewhere? Would you enjoy watching that in a live concert? Neither would anyone else.

And these are supposed to be professional instruments.... (don't worry, Korg is still light years ahead of Roland)

[sutekh]

OK, still struggling to make it work right. I mostly use the controller with two Combos, so I switched off a lot of the MIDI filters for those combos and it stopped some of the ridiculous things from happening- such as the sound cutting off when I move the keytar around cause it thinks I'm using the Ribbon, which the Kross recognizes as the mod wheel.

I've noticed there are very few problems when controlling the Minilogue, probably because it doesn't do nearly as much as the Kross. Another example of how Less Is More, I wish programmers would learn that.

[Koekepan]

I'm not sure how one would apply Less is More to an all-in-one kind of box like a keyboard workstation. Could you give some kind of description of how you'd change the Kross to implement that?

[LittleWhite]

Having some strange MIDI hiccups as well with the KK2.
Latest is it firing off a pattern start on a SR18 drum machine unintentionally.
Not sure if things have changed much with MIDI predictability- my old sequencer from 1990 did a better job in a lot of ways.
I am HOPING it is a learning curve issue and I just need to go over the hundreds of settings amongst the pages

[sutekh]

As far as "less is more" I was able to turn off a lot of the MIDI stuff in the individual combos that I use the controller with most often. But you have to go into each individual combo to do this, you can't pick and choose which MIDI messages to ignore globally.

And I still have strange things happen. I programmed a split with an arpeggiator on the bass sound- something went wrong and the controller changed one of the settings, so now the arpeggiator refuses to play the pattern the way I need it to, and I can't find the setting that's different. . I had to program a new User Arpeggio from scratch.

If all you could control thru MIDI were the keys plus velocity, not much would ever go wrong. But all these program changes are ready and eagerly waiting for your hand to brush up against the wrong button and permanently screw up your sound during a live performance.