Midi jungle o wires

[jsquare]

Hey, hey. Yhis is my first post to this bbs and I wanna start with a question. We are shopping for a midi interface. Our computer is a Pentium II, non USB with serial ports. Our current setup is a soundblaster card with a simple 1 in, 1 out interface hooked up to the joystick port. Yhis is hooked up to a JL Cooper 8 in, 8 out midi patchbay. This setup is ok, but we now have a new member in our cooperative studio and his gear is putting things over the top. I've checked out the MOTU Midi Express XT and it seems to be the answer. We now have a combined 3 samplers, 8 modules, 3 FX units and 2 controller boxes(Lexicon MRC and Roland PG 10).
My question is once we get our new midi interface, how do I hook all this up? We want at least 8 midi channels of modules, 16 channels of samplers, and the fx synched to midi clock at any given time. Also when mixing, we'll need our controller boxes to do real time FX parameter changes( reverb decay time, panning, etc.)and also control faders and plug in parameters in our sequencer/ digital audio program.
Ya still with me? I know midi can sometimes be a little boring and geeky, but to do these cool, creative things with it, I need some help planning our setup. Anyone have any ideas? If you had all these midi ins and outs and channels to deal with, how would you do it? I appreciate any help I can get and am glad to be a part of this online community. Thanks.

 

[rjt]

Well not an easy task. Ideally, you would want one midi in/out for each source, then each could have 16 channels. You can achieve this by having more than one patch by hooked into your computer. I currently have an express XT (for another week or so) and it works fine, but I am not sure if you could have 2 (I suspect they would conflict) but you could probably add a different patch bay (I have heard that there is a limited (10 or 12) number of midi ports that windows could address simultaneously before it crashed. At one time I exceeded that with a combination of hardware and software midi ports and didn't have a problem but who knows....

Other options include. Getting a stand alone 8x8 and plugging it into one of the ports of the express xt. Then each of the sound sources that are most common could have their own port and those that are used less frequently could share channels.

The final option would be to put more than one sound source on each port as needed. Lets say you have a sound module x and one y which will have to share a port. Run midi out from the express xt to midi in on module x, then run midi thru from module x to midi in on module y. To get you sequencer to talk to both, you will have to select the same port but you could assigned channels 1-8 to module x and channels 9-16 to module y. As long as both are not set to the same channel, should be fine.