This is a video about me being happy that I finally took the time to hook up network midi.

I sort of have this (totally first world) dilemma where I feel like I need to have ALL MY MUSIC gear hooked up and ready to go, but I also have to have a clean and tidy desk. I do web development for a living, I’m often learning new things and occasionally work from home as well, so I just need to not be distracted by a bunch of drum machines and stuff in front of me when I’m trying to work. Clean & tidy desk is a must.

A clean desk and bunch of synths with their endless wires and shit are kind of at odds with one another. So, I have all my synths set up on a table behind me. It’s a completely “out of the box” set up, meaning I can sequence, record, mix and make music without needing a computer. Awesome, but….

I also like using my computer to make tunes and love sequencing with my Ableton Push. But there’s not enough room on the table behind me for my laptop and my Push, without having to move a bunch of crap, which totally kills the creativity.

I was telling my wife this weekend that I wished there were a way I could just control all the crap behind me, from my desk, but only sometimes. Then I realized that I can, because I have an iConnect Midi 4+.

In the end it was just a matter of running an Ethernet cable from my iConnect to my router, then I was able to use my macs network midi utility to send midi over wifi. Click here to see how to set it up. I use a Thunderbolt 2 dock, from OWC, which has an Ethernet port on it, and I just so happened to have a really long Ethernet cable as well, so I now have my Macbook Pro hard wired to the router as well.

All this means I can now sit at my desk and sequence all my hardware on the other side of the room, which makes me really happy. There’s no noticeable latency when I am playing, but I’m a hobbyist. This may not work for a hardcore keyboard player.

Also, I should mention that the Ableton session on my computer is being used solely to sequence the gear on the other side of the room. If I were to, for example, try to run a virtual instrument in the Ableton session and the drum brute on the other side of the room there would definitely be some latency issues.

For now though, I’m going to get a long ass audio cable to run from the mixer, round the room, and into my sound card, so I can multi track instruments into an Ableton session if I want. Also, my mixer, a Behringer UFX1204, has the ability to multi-track record to a USB thumb drive, so I can noodle around, get some ideas, then pop the USB drive out and pull the tracks into my Ableton session.

One day I’ll have a space that allows me to not have to send midi over my network, and in an ideal world I’d be able to have all my gear directly connected to my computer — but for today I’m glad to have these additional options and this makes me pretty happy. 🙂