I have an old ensoniq EPS. I’m confused but I think the EPS sends out midi clock and not midi time code. I could be wrong but this is my dilemma.
A long time ago I was recording in a music studio - this would have been 1999, and I did not have eight separate outputs for my ensoniq. So we had to record each track separately. And I don’t remember which recording software and hardware the studio used but when I hit play on the EPS the software automatically recognized the command and began recording. When the drums from the EPS were recorded we went back to the beginning, I hit play on the EPS, with the drums now muted, and the synthesizer sound began recording on a new track, perfectly synched to the drums that had already been recorded. I had another synth sound and did the same thing - hit play and the software recognized the incoming signal and recorded the new sound from the EPS.
You get the idea. That old EPS got stolen and I replaced it with a rackmount version that has 8 outputs.
My problem now is that 20 years later I am using Cubase Artist 7.5 and it doesn’t use the same midi signal. Assuming my EPS uses MIDI clock and Cubase uses MTC, I can’t figure out how to synch the recording. People say to make the EPS the slave but that doesn’t seem to work either (where I assume I hit record on Cubase and it sends a signal to the EPS to start playing instead of the other way around)
I just want my recordings to start at the push of a button so the midi parts are perfectly lined up on the midi map/grid in Cubase (I already have the notes quantized in the EPS) and I can tweak them later. I really don’t like using the “drawing note events” method of writing music. It’s a whole bunch of no fun whatsoever. I like playing my songs and having them ready to go when I send the midi outs to cubase, converting the sounds I have on the floppys loaded into the EPS to the limitless sounds I can choose from VSTs like Halion Sonic or Retrologue.
Right now what I am doing is listening to the countdown click on the EPS and just hitting record on Cubase as close to the beginning as I can get it.
The other thing I am not sure about is setting up the “snap to grid” function so that when I do the countdown method it will do pretty much that: line everything up on the grid for me if it is close enough. I just don’t know if that is how that works. If it does then I guess that’s close enough. But I’d really like for Cubase to start recording when I hit play on my awesome 80s sequencer
Sorry this was so long. Any help would be appreciated.
