Midi Chain structure - Looking for some guidance

[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]

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]

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

[MichaelBender]

Hi all, how about if I have instruments that do MIDI over USB? Can I use a standard USB hub connecting them to the Nome II?

[simntonic]

Hey Michael,

Just to make sure I understand correctly: are you asking if you can connect multiple USB MIDI devices directly to Nome II using a USB hub?
If so, that’s unfortunately not supported. Nome isn’t designed to act as a USB host for multiple external devices like that.

[MichaelBender]

Thanks Simon. So if I have instruments that only do MIDI over USB would I connect Nome II to my laptop and then connect the instruments via USB to the laptop? I run Abelton.

Thanks!
Mike

[simntonic]

Hey Mike,

Yes, that’s a possible way to do it

In that case: Nome II connects to your laptop. Your USB-only instruments also connect to the laptop and Ableton handles the MIDI routing between them

So Ableton basically becomes the “hub” for all USB MIDI devices, and Nome handles the clock side of things.

Just to note: this setup can work well, but it’s not quite the same as sending clock directly over MIDI DIN from Nome, USB MIDI depends on the computer, so timing can be a bit less tight depending on the setup.

Still, for most use cases it should work.