I want to use e1 to control parameters on octatrack and rytm and be in clock sync. Later add a roland tb03. The octatrack is master clock at the moment. When I put e1 midi out to octatrack midi in and octatrack midi out to rytm midi in, it syncs the clock and I can control only the octatrack’s parameters. When I put e1 midi out to octatrack midi in and octatrack midi thru to to rytm midi in, I can control both machine’s parameters but the rytm doesn’t clock sync. I can’t find a way to have them clock synced and control both machines parameters. I’m a bit new to midi! Any help would be gratefully received after a whole day of getting nowhere!
I had a similar situation where my Electron boxes were not forwarding CC messages in the MIDI out.
It’s annoying when you don’t want to mess with MIDI tracks.
Bwhat I ended up doing was to get a Blokas Midihub.
The Midihub is a programmable MIDI router/processor with 4 inputs and 4 outputs.
The ports are labelled from A to D.
You would connect your Octatrack’s MIDI in and out to output and input A on the Midihub.
You would connect the MIDI in of your Rhythm to output B.
You would connect additional devices devices that should be clock-synced to the C and D output.
Would connect a MIDI out from the E1 to input B.
You could then configure the Midihub to take the clock input from input A and send it to outputs B, C and D.
You could also configure it to take the CC messages from input B and send it to all the outputs.
You could also do some optimisations, like using different channels for CC messages, so that every message that should target a specific device has the same channel, and then filter out the irrelevant channels via the Midihub when you send CC to a specific output.
In your specific configuration, even if you turn Transport Send/Receive and Clock Send/Receive on in the Octatrack Sync menu, it may not pass the incoming clock to the Thru port.
In (MIDI) theory, the Thru port is a simple passthrough of whatever is coming in the MIDI In port.
Back in the day when it was just hardwired that way, things worked. Now with devices processing MIDI and sometimes doing additional filtering/processing, often, clock messages are not passed to the Thru port.
as @szszoke mentioned, adding a hub or splitter or some type of MIDI patchbay thingie is the best answer for short term solutions and for long term growth with minimal additional headaches.