GR-33 no longer communicating with workstation

cooltouch

New member
Hello, this is my first post to the forum. I'm here for two reasons -- I'm very rusty on the ins and outs of MIDI, so I can really use a comprehensive refresher, but my most immediate need is to get my Roland GR-33 guitar synth working again.

I bought my GR-33 years ago -- back in about 2001, I guess it was, and I used it back then on several pieces of music I wrote -- with great effect. Back then I was running my Digital Audio Workstation on a Win98 platform and was using Cakewalk's Pro Audio 9 as my DAW software. I had the direct round MIDI ports in my system as well as a joystick/MIDI port. All were being used because I had several pieces of MIDI hardware connected to my system. After using it for recording those pieces, I let the system idle -- for entirely too long.

Nowadays, I have no MIDI ports on my system, so I'm having to use USB instead. I have two Midiman Midisport 2x2 MIDI-to-USB converters that I bought years ago, one of which is in use right now. Its drivers have been successfully installed. And I'm running my GR-33's MIDI out into the system using this one Midisport 2x2. The DAW software is still Cakewalk -- Sonar Platinum, which is the direct descendant from Pro Audio 9. Sonar doesn't "see" the GR-33. Instead, it sees the Midisport 2x2. But I have an instrument definition file for the GR-33 loaded and I've associated the Midisport's 16 channels to the GR-33. So now, when I load an instrument in Sonar, it sees the GR-33 instruments.

When I first hooked my GR-33 up to this system, everything behaved normally. Because I had an instrument file installed in Sonar for the GR-33, Sonar was able to access its instrument patches and was successfully playing them in a few pieces I tried it out with. Then suddenly, it stopped working. This was a few weeks ago and I've been struggling to get it back working ever since. I'm not 100% sure, but I think what might have caused it was, one day, I was playing around with the GR-33's buttons, and I punched the "Write" button, which loaded the first patch, A11 and its name. I don't recall what I did after that, but I do know I messed up that patch and a couple of others, so fearing I'd really messed things up, I went ahead and did a system reset -- which resulted in my losing about a half-dozen custom patches I'd made. Unfortunately doing this reset did not solve the issue.

I've gone through the manual, step by step, which isn't a very easy read, by the way, with anything having to do with MIDI and it hasn't done any good. It might appear that the problem lies with Sonar and my having something set wrong, but actually I really doubt it. Since Sonar loads a fresh page with each new song, it doesn't seem like there would be any carry-over if I had something set wrong in a previous tune. So if I have something set wrong in Sonar regarding the GR-33, it would have to be something in its set-up area, but as near as I can tell, everything there is correct.

When I play a piece of music, if I select the Roland in a track, Sonar responds, showing volume in the track's console slider, but the GR-33 is completely silent and unresponsive. If I change instruments, the GR-33 doesn't show the new instrument selected. It stays on the default voice, A11, or whatever other voice I might have set it to. The Midisport is even showing activity. Normally, with the GR-33 turned on, but not active, the Midisport has a single LED that pulses fairly rapidly. But as soon as Sonar is telling it to play something, three LEDs light up and begin pulsing with the music. And get this -- if I play the guitar while Sonar is running, the GR-33's sounds are getting through to Sonar. It even lights up the volume slider in the correct track when I play something! But still no sound when Sonar's asking for it. So this is indicating to me that the problem lies with the GR-33 itself. But as I said above, I've been through everything with manual in hand, and I don't know what I've missed.

Sorry about the length of this post, but I had a lot of "'splainin' to do."

So, any ideas?
 
Well, it is fixed -- for now. I'm not really sure what did it. One of the things I did -- even though I'd done it to most just a few days ago -- I took apart every connection, cleaned them best I could, then put them back together. I also went back over the GR-33's internal settings. When I fired up Sonar, the GR-33's channel let out a sharp chirp, which surprised me. It settled down to chirping at the beginning of each note played. I had no idea where that sound was coming from -- or rather, I had no idea what patch was making that sound. I had selected a voice patch. It was as if the GR-33 was waking up after a long period of downtime. I kept trying to coax the right sound out of it by repeatedly opening the menu and selecting the voice patch, and by deselecting and reselecting the GR-33 as the synth. This seemed to help. Slowly and quietly at first, the voice appeared. And then I was dealing with sudden spikes in volume and random patches briefly sounding off. But I kept at it. I ended up having to configure the GR-33 a bit differently than I usually do for a synth and MIDI patches, but it was at last working reliably.

So I wish I could state exactly what it was that was causing the problem -- I wouldn't be surprised if there were more than one issue causing it. But I'm so relieved I found it. The GR-33 is a very capable tool, with a set of voices that can be very convincing. And this synth -- or one very like it -- is essential for the work I'm doing right now.

I had become so discouraged with the lack of progress with my GR-33 that I was on the verge of writing it off. At one point I was at GC's website and I came within a single click of buying a clean used GR-55. The only thing that eventually stopped me was that it didn't come with the GK-3 pickup, which would have added enough to the price such that it would no longer have been a good deal at all. And then I started giving the Fishman Triple Play a hard look. Its price was attractive, plus new ones come with a large bundle of useful software. Two of the main software items were superfluous for me, however, since I already owned versions from those publishers that were very close to what was being included in the FTP bundle. Actually, I still find the FTP to be very attractive and I might still at a later date pull the trigger on one.

Okay, well, unfortunately I can't say that my experiences were particularly useful for anyone who might be having the same problems -- except maybe refusing to give up. I guess that accounts for something.
 
I should have checked back in here sooner. As it turns out, I managed to get the GR-33 to work for that one music file only. It still won't work on all the others. And what's worse, when I went back to play that file again several days later, the GR-33 was silent. So, I don't know.

I've tried everything I can think of on this machine. I've just recently installed Sonar (actually it's Cakewalk by Bandlab now) on my laptop so I think what I'm going to try next is to see if I can get it to run on my laptop's copy of Sonar. If it does, then I know that my desktop's copy of Sonar is the problem. If it doesn't then it sure looks like I have a problem with the GR-33 itself. Specifically MIDI in/out it would appear.

I'll check back in when I know more.
 
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