Working with Ext Instruments (MS2)

Question

Working with external instruments is a very nice addition to MS2. However, I seem to have uncovered some limitations, unless someone else is able to offer an alternative:
Basic config ... I have a single midi controller (EWI) that only transmits on one channel (ch 1). I have an external synth and external effects unit I want to use in various patches.
I have learned that you can't use the same keyboard object and assign it as the input for both the external synth and external effects unit. Even though my EWI transmits on channel 1 only (monophonic) and in both MainStage and Audio Midi setup, the synth is set to receive on channel 1 and the effects to receive on channel 5, whenever I play notes and both external units are receiving their information from the same keyboard, the notes I play on channel 1 are somehow received on the effects unit on channel 5. The result is that the effects unit thinks its getting program changes when it's not. Weird ...
My workaround is to create a Midi object (because I don't want two keyboards on the screen), and assign one to EWI channel 1 and the other to EWI channel 5. Then when creating my patch, I assign the midi input for the external synth to EWI(1) and the external effects to EWI(5). This seems to work, but I wonder if the creation of the extra midi object and assignments causes additional memory usage that could be avoided by using the same one for all things. In fact, since the external effects unit only needs to receive program changes, I wonder why it needs a midi input assignment anyway, since it should just be receiving the program changes from Mainstage and not my EWI.
Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Blueberry wrote:
Hmm, I don't really understand your problem.
- You can define a keyboard object to ignore the incoming channel.
I only have 1 incoming channel
- I don't know what you mean with "MIDI object". An external channel strip? That channel strip doesn't allow to define a channel as an input. It only has a MIDI port and channel as an output. The input for all channel strips is always a workspace object (which is abstract and doesn't have a channel)
In MS2 there is a new object called Midi Object that seems to act as a replacement for a keyboard object, except it looks like a little bubble and doesn't display any layers.
What I am trying to do is create a patch that is comprised of either two external instrument channel strips or one softsynth channnel strip and one external instrument channel strip where the external inst channel strip is used to send a midi program change to an external effects processor. In either of these two cases, I have found that if I make the midi input the same as my EWI (channel 1), even though it (the external effects unit) is configured to only receive data on channel 5, it still receives note information which appears to be program change messages. The only way to remedy this is to create either a second keyboard object or one of the new midi objects and assign it's input to EWI on midi channel 5, which technically is nothing since that incoming channel from the EWI, doesn't really exist. It seems like a bug to me because, using a patch bay like a MOTU MTP AV and assigning channels to unique pieces of gear helped to prevent any commands from going from one input device to an output device unless you wanted them to.
Again, I don't really understand your problem.
I know I am probably not explaining this well.