Midi Chain structure - Looking for some guidance

Any other questions, about other gear or your DAW for example.
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Cra5her
Posts: 4
Joined: Yesterday, 13:38

Midi Chain structure - Looking for some guidance

Post by Cra5her »

Hi there,
Just wanted to ask a bit of advice about best practice.
I am using Nome ii as my master clock. I have a lot of gear that all needs to be synced by midi. I am running various drum machines and synths which feed into three synced Boss RC505 Mk2 loop stations, each with two separate and distinctly different FX loops. My plan was to run the Midi 1 output from the Nome ii to a Midi Solutions Quadra Thru box. Three of these four outputs route to the three RC505MK2 loop stations. I would then use the midi thru on each RC505 Mk2 to route to the external stereo fx loops. The fourth channel from the Quadra box would route to the instrument group by daisy chaining midi thru ports. The question is, is this going to cause some latency issues?

Would I be better off aiming not to use any midi thru ports on the various devices, and instead opt to connect the Master Nome ii to two separate Quadra thru boxes thus givng 8 (identical journey) midi channels and then connecting each of these to individual bits of gear?

Eight, however, isn't quite enough for all my gear.

Would the ideal solution therefore be to route the Master Nome ii outputs two two other slave Nome ii's and then each of those four outputs to a Quadra thru box, giving me 16 identical midi channels. Is there any advantage to doing this over routing a Nome ii Master to a Quadra thru box and then routing each of those four outputs to another quadra thru box? This would also give 16 identical journey outputs, but be a lot cheaper than buying three Nome's.

Will anyone be able to detect a difference between these three setups?

I plan to use my DAW (Logic Pro) to record my performances. Will the increased number of layers of midi connections cause me latency issues?

Hoping for a bit of wisdom and advice.

Thanks in advance.

Cra5her
pmags
Posts: 3
Joined: 21 Oct 2025, 05:05

Re: Midi Chain structure - Looking for some guidance

Post by pmags »

I'd try and use as few additional devices in your MIDI chain as possible -- more boxes just means more points of failure / confusion.

Both Midi Solutions and Erica Synths make 8 output MIDI thru boxes.

You could combined 8 + 4 if that's enough for your setup, or 8 + 8.


EDIT: And Kenton makes 12- and 25-channel MIDI thru boxes --

https://kentonuk.com/product/thru-12/

https://kentonuk.com/product/thru-25/

They cite <1 microscecond latency in their specs. One of those should be sufficient for almost any setup!
Cra5her
Posts: 4
Joined: Yesterday, 13:38

Re: Midi Chain structure - Looking for some guidance

Post by Cra5her »

Good shout!
The Kenton 25 will work great and I wasn't aware of it.
Thanks very much for responding. Appreciate it.
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