A Music Director's Epic Tale: Les Miserables
Chapter 4 : Musical Gear
4.5 - MIDI Interface
Having all this wonderful MIDI gear is great, but it needs to be tied together!
For this show, and for most of my complex MIDI setups, I rely on the Cakewalk UM-3G. This is a 3x3 USB MIDI interface, which means it connects to the PC via USB and works like a router, passing messages which come into it to the master program, in my case MIDI Maestro, and sending messages from the master to the MIDI equipment "downstream". It can support a maximum of 3 inputs and 3 outputs, connected with standard MIDI cables.
It fit the bill because I needed to have three separate MIDI ports outbound from the PC (to route MIDI messages to the Fantom and the XV5080 synthesizers and the Muse Receptor synth host), and also used one inbound MIDI port (from the keyboard controller which needed to talk to MIDI Maestro). This interface was rock solid and I had absolutely no MIDI issues (like dropouts or latency) during the entire run of the show.
