Deskew Blog

I use a pretty sophisticated live keyboard rig with my band, No Sleep Tonite, and have just finished a major overhaul whose goal was to reduce significantly the setup/teardown time from about 2 hours down to about 10 minutes.

For those of you interested in music technology, my live rig consists of six keyboards including a Korg Oasys, Roland VK88, Minimoog XL, Prophet ’08, Yamaha AN1x (used only as a controller) and an Akai MPK61 controller. I also have a Roland AX-1 keytar which I use occasionally with a wireless MIDI setup, and more recently, I’ve started playing the Eigenharp (but that’s a whole ‘nother story). Of course I also use Scorecerer on an iPad (shameless plug) to view my sheet music, notes and setlists. There are also about 9 footpedals in the rig, for audio volume and MIDI CC control used for volume, expression, sustain and so forth.

Everything is managed through Apple MainStage although I use very few AU plugins with it and instead added a Muse Research Receptor for that. MainStage is mostly responsible for MIDI control (it sends out all program changes) along with routing, layering and splits. It also enables knobs, sliders and buttons on several of my boards to control parameters of any sound in real-time as needed.

Until the overhaul, the VK-88 audio was hardwired into a Line-6 M13 effects processor and the Minimoog audio was hardwired into a Boss RE-20 Space Echo. All the audio outputs were sent to an A&H 20 channel mixer and a two-channel mix goes to FOH. Connecting everything up was always a headache with a maze of cables. The plan was to build harnesses to carry power, audio (in and out), MIDI (in and out) from a new rack to each device (including pedals/effects, which would be mounted on pedalboards).

Mike Vegas, a rather amazing and experienced musician/engineering craftsman took a look at my rig and made a couple of fascinating suggestions the most important of which was to eliminate the A&H mixer (and a 12U rack) and replacing it with a MOTU 828MkIII/8Pre in conjunction with an SSL X-Patch. All audio devices and my effects units would be connected directly to the X-Patch. The outputs from the X-Patch would go into the 828/8Pre combo and finally a stereo feed would go from the 828 to FOH. A couple of MOTU 128s were to be used to handle all MIDI connections.

So a few weeks ago, and with more than a little trepidation, I disconnected everything and sent my rig to Mike’s workshop. Last Thursday evening, Mike called to say everything was ready for me to test so off I went. Note that Mike had tested all the physical connections but my laptop was needed to be able to actually configure everything.

Since the Receptor and the X-Patch both use Ethernet, Mike also installed a wireless  router inside the rack so that there is a private subnet for the system. The Mac, Receptor and X-Patch are connected with cable and the iPad can connect over wifi. Wifi on the Mac itself is disabled during “play time” as it’s not clear how well wifi works with all the other real-time stuff is going on. However, because I still want the Mac to be able to access the internet over wifi and most wifi routers are configured to use 192.168.1.x, I setup the router to use a different subset, 192.168.3.x and that, it turns out, is what led to the first “show stopper” problem.

I downloaded the X-Patch remote configuration app and ran it. It immediately detected the X-Patch, displayed its firmware and let me select it. The next step was to configure networking. I noticed that it was set to DHCP by default so figured I was done, as the router was configured to hand out DHCP addresses. So then I went to the channel configuration section where I’m supposed to enter the names of all the devices connected to the X-Patch. I entered the name of the first device into the first box and then clicked on the next box to enter the second name. As soon as I did that, the name I had typed into the first box disappeared.

To cut a long story short, it turned out that nothing I entered anywhere would stick. I wondered whether, in spite of the app indicating that the X-Patch was online, they were not actually communicating. So next, I checked the active DHCP leases on the router and noticed that only my Mac and my iPad were showing up (the Receptor was not turned on). So the X-Patch DHCP client was apparently not working. So I went back into the X-Patch app and clicked on “Static IP” and defined an address, subnet and gateway on the .3 network. After doing that, the app told me that I should power-cycle the X-Patch and then restart the app again.

I did that and…..nothing! Stuff I typed in was still disappearing as soon as I switched to another field. When I went back to the networking section, it was set back to DHCP and the static IP information I had previously defined was gone.

I was now the proud owner of a keyboard rig which made absolutely no sounds. John Cage would have been proud! Went home that night pretty discouraged. Although I did manage to get hold of someone at SSL the next morning but their only real suggestion was that the router was probably faulty. I found that hard to believe since other devices connected via that router were working just fine.

When I went back to the workshop, I had one idea which I thought I would try. I disconnected my Mac from the external network (which was on the .1 subnet) and then reconfigured the internet router so that it would use the .1 subnet instead of .3 and lo and behold, the X-Patch application worked perfectly. Great feelings of relief followed by some annoyance as to why so much time got wasted on that issue. I’d have figured the problem out in 5 minues if the X-Patch application simply said it couldn’t connect to the unit. Not sure what one does if they’re experienced with network troubleshooting.

So the fundamental problem was that even though it looked like the X-Patch application was connecting to the hardware (it said the hardware was “online”), it really wasn’t connected and the only way to make it work was to reconfigure the router to suit the X-Patch. I have no idea why it couldn’t pick up a DHCP connection in the first place unless the X-Patch comes from the factory with a static IP address as the default and since the application couldn’t connect, it wouldn’t even tell me that.

By the way, now that I have it working, it’s quite a wonderful device. There’s a very tiny audible click when I switch patches, but nothing to be concerned about and it’s delightful to be able to use effects pedals on different instruments at different times and not be committed to a single permanent routing.