So, I made a thing.

Every so often you just have to rip your studio apart and start over.  During the last year, like everyone else, I did a lot of livestreaming.  As a result I added a bunch of video capability, got a better understanding of how to make some parts of my setup better, and generally messed around with both audio and video.   I got some good work out of it, but I also got such an ungodly tangle of cables and power cords that I was scared it’d become self-aware.  And the iConnect MIDI4+ I’d used as my interface for five years or more was starting to give me grief.   At the very least I needed to rip down the accumulated cabling mess and start over.   But… with the pandemic loosening its grip, and the prospect of some possible live shows within the next year, it seemed like time to think through all my various little problems and see if a cleaned-up and organized rig would solve them.

Straightening out the video rig was one piece of the puzzle, but there’s really not a lot to say about it.  I added the simplest, cheapest HDMI patch panel imaginable, mostly to make it easier to reroute stuff between the different setups I use for JamKazam sessions and solo livestreamed shows.   I “formalized” some cabling I put in for cameras in various positions around the room (“formalizing” means “adding enough zip ties to make it look as if I meant it, even if it’s still not particularly neat”).  And I found that the market badly needs a more-than-six-foot-long HDMI extension cable that is more flexible than a piece of re-rod. 

Synthesizers and audio were more of a challenge, because there were at least three ways that I could imagine using the overall setup.  It was important to have a core component that I could just — literally — pick up and take to a live show somewhere.  I also wanted to be able to expand that core setup to use hardware synths and other random doodads either for livestreaming shows, or conceivably for more ambitious shows elsewhere.  Finally, I wanted to have a decent setup for the construction of more complicated electronic pieces — that is, for home studio recording.   I started with the core piece — the road rig.

Case and device-holding

The case in which the road rig is built is a rifle case from Harbor Freight, on sale for $99 at the time I bought it.  Flambeau makes a similar one.  Rifle and gun cases are pretty damn durable, and a lot cheaper than the ones sold for musicians and photographers.   This one’s about 5 feet long, 16” wide, and 5-6” deep.  It comes with pick-apart foam in the bottom and an egg-crate foam liner in the top.   The hinges are tight-pins. It has rollers on one end, so you can pull rather than carry it, although as things turned out it’s lightweight enough.  I also acquired a 3 foot length of regular vinyl wire shelving, and I reused a laptop cooling stand that has a tilting top.  I’ve used two of those as supports for iPads for 5 years now, and I love them.  The general idea was to use the wire shelving as a way to attach the various components (using zip ties), and to provide a means of keeping wiring out of the way (by running it under the shelving).  I decided that the best way to do this was to put it flange-down (just as it would be in a closet) with the flange toward the back of the case and the shelf anchored to the case’s front wall and bottom.   This orientation also had the advantage of providing an open wiring gutter at the back.

I did a rough layout of the components I intended to put in the case by arranging them in the bottom, and checked a few measurements to make sure the lid would close fully once they were in place.  This gave me a good idea of where to cut the wire shelving into two lengths, one to be placed on each side of the iPad stand.  It also gave me a much better idea of what I would need for cables.  The arrangement is pretty tight, so I ended up ordering some USB host cables with right-angled ends, and some 12” right-angled TRS cables as well.  It’s surprising how much clearance a straight-in TRS connector needs. 

You could cut the wire shelving with a hacksaw, but I used bolt cutters.  Once cut, you can file it smooth, but since I have a 1” benchtop vertical belt sander I used that — it’s much easier.  A little spray-white enamel from Tom’s Historic Spray Paint Collection covered the sanded-off bits.   The shelving was anchored in place using the regular u-shaped wire shelving mounting clips.   I was a little nervous about cracking the case, and I wanted to keep it waterproof if at all possible, so I used washers inside and out and I added a ¼” rubber plumbing washer on the outside to seal the hole, and those acorn-shaped nylon-center locknuts to keep everything in place.  The iPad stand was mounted similarly, but I had a little more clearance and could use fender washers to spread the load on the case even more.

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The rifle case, in its native form, had one disadvantage — the lid is fairly heavy, and has a tendency to tip the case over even once there’s a fair amount of stuff in the case.  I also wanted to take it all the way off so that it would not block my view onstage.  The supplied hinges are tight-pins, but the pins were easily removed with a pin punch, a small screwdriver, and a pair of needlenose locking pliers (you could use pretty much anything to accomplish this task).  My first attempt at making loose pin hinges was unsuccessful.  I’d chosen to make my pins from rod that was the same diameter as the existing pins (9/64”).  They were very hard to get in and out, so much so that they’d be a real pain during setups and teardowns.   I thought about it a little more, and realized that I could use ⅛” steel rod without sacrificing the water-tightness of the case.  And I remembered an old stagehand’s trick for loose-pin hinges: you take a file or sander and taper the end of the pin that’s inserted into the hinge, which makes it much easier to get in.  Problem solved. 

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Next came a long period of arranging and rearranging stuff to get it to fit properly.   For the record, here’s what’s in the case:

• MOTU UltraLite Mk5 interface
• OP-1, with Pyle hum eliminator
• Volante tape-echo pedal
• Hall of Fame reverb
• 1010Music Blackbox sample player
• iPad Pro, with tilting stand
• MidiFighter Twister
• CircuitHappy MissingLink Ableton synchronizer
• Assorted MIDI USB host, multiport hub, and distribution boxes
• A big-ass power strip/surge protector

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Word to the wise: cable everything before you anchor it.  It also helps to have a pair of needlenose pliers or forceps to fish cables up through the wire shelving (and one of those little three-prong grabbers would be better still).   As it turned out, only one device I use (the OP-1) can’t really be anchored with zip ties, so I am planning on using a velcro “travel strap” that can be removed for performance, along with a foam block to help hold it down when the case is closed.  

For reasons explained in the section on MIDI routing below, I ended up adding a couple of MIDI doodads that I had not originally planned on.   Fortunately, these would tuck in under the wire shelving without too much trouble.  I put the powered USB hub in the under-part of the iPad stand, to keep it accessible.

Audio

Audio routing was straightforward, because the MOTU… just works.   My iPad has a lightning connector, so I connected it to the MOTU using the lightning-connector version of the USB camera kit.  That permits the iPad to continue charging while it’s connected to a host.  I needed a USB-B to USB-C cable, because the MOTU is USB-C.  Once that was done… everything from the MOTU was just … there.  Inputs to the MOTU were visible both as stereo pairs and individual channels in AUM, the MOTU’s MIDI in and out were in AUM’s MIDI routing display, and so on.  

Beyond that, I was using two stereo instruments (an OP-1 chained through a hum filter and some effects, and the 1010Blackbox sampler) that were cabled to the MOTU.  No muss, no fuss, no bother.  The MOTU has an onboard software mixer, and the CueMix software that runs it is available for the iPad.  At this writing I’ve not tried to do anything fancy with it yet (or really learned much about it), but it seems quite capable (and has both EQ and compression built in, which is helpful).   For livestreaming and JamKazam, there’s an SP/DIF output that I can connect directly to the audio interface I use with my streaming/JK machine.   For studio work with a separate desktop-computer recording setup, there’s an ADAT out that will connect with the Scarlett 18i20 I have as part of the recording rig.   If I want to use external hardware synths for livestreaming or JK, I can either limit myself to two, or I can sub-mix them and cable that output to the MOTU. If I’m recording, they can be cabled directly to the Scarlett I mentioned a moment ago.

MIDI

MIDI routing and cabling turned out to be the biggest challenge of the whole building process, partly because MIDI is sort of a pain in the ass generally and partly because I was spoiled (and deluded) by the iConnectMIDI4+ I’d been using before.  Under the heading of “sort of a pain in the ass generally”, I had these constraints:

1. The OP-1 only takes MIDI via USB.
2. The Blackbox only takes MIDI via 5-pin DIN, and has in and out jacks, but no thru.
3. The Volante effects pedal takes either USB or DIN, but it also has no thru.
4. The MIDIFighter Twister takes only USB and needs to control both the iPad and the Blackbox
5. The MOTU takes only DIN, and has no thru or indeed any USB connector of any kind, except for the USB-C connector intended for the iPad. 

None of these devices will act as a USB host [later note: it’s possible that the Overhub will, but I have not yet been able to test that successfully]

That last item requires a little explanation.  The USB standard separates the world of USB gadgets into devices and hosts.   Hosts are more capable — they basically act as a controller, where a simple USB device acts as a follower.  This harks back to the days when USB was thought of as a way for desktop or laptop computers to communicate with peripherals like printers — the “host” was the computer, and the device was a peripheral.  The division between the two gets a little blurry, especially with adapters that support USB-On-The-Go.  The result is confusion, mostly mine.

The USB-OTG article provides a decent explanation of those distinctions, but the main takeaway is this: you can’t just connect a bunch of USB devices to a hub, even a powered one, and expect that they’ll all communicate.  They won’t.   I was used to having an interface that acted both as a USB host and as a MIDI router — and now I didn’t. 

So at the very least I needed something that would act as a USB host, and hopefully provide a bridge between 5-pin-MIDI-world and USB-MIDI-world.  There are a couple such devices out there, but one of them seems to have reliability issues, so I ended up with a Kenton Mk3 USB MIDI host.  It will also communicate with USB MIDI devices through a powered hub, so I connected an Elektron Overhub to it, and used that to connect my MIDIFighter Twister and the OP-1.   I fed MIDI into it from the MOTU’s MIDI out port (which also carries MIDI information coming from the iPad).  But now I had another problem — I needed to connect two or three DIN-style devices to the MIDI output of the Kenton — the MOTU’s MIDI in, the Blackbox, and (for preference) the Volante.  So I needed a splitter.  For that purpose, I got a DoReMiDI Thru-6 .  As I mentioned before, both the Kenton and the DoReMiDI will tuck in under the wire shelving, though it did take a little trial and error to get them positioned correctly.   That also leaves me with a MIDI out that I can send to outboard hardware synths should I need it (typically I’m only sending them clock and note information, and don’t need anything back from them). 

[ Note: Charles Shriner tells me it didn’t need to be this complicated; apparently, if I’d run the MOTU’s USB to the Overhub, and connected everything else to that, I would not have needed a separate USB hosting device; I guess the Overhub will behave as one. I have not yet been able to get this to work.]

Of course, MIDI carries both clock and note information (it’s particularly nice to be able to use iPad sequencers and generative apps to trigger hardware synths), so a separate word about tempo sync is in order.   I use the MissingLink device to provide synchronized USB clock and Ableton Link  tempo control.  Almost all iPad instruments now have Link support, as does AUM — which means it can send synchronized clock information out via the MOTU, and to those few iPad instruments that don’t support Link themselves. 

External connections

The MOTU has both ADAT and SP/DIF(coaxial) outputs.  The ADAT will be used to send eight channels of audio to the Scarlett 18i20 that’s part of my recording setup (I’m not yet sure whether this is going to raise sample-clock issues, but I’ll find out soon enough).  The SP/DIF runs to a splitter that sends signal via optical connectors to my monitoring setup and also to the audio interface I use for livestreaming.   I also have cables installed to send MIDI to an external rack of hardware synthesizers, and USB for whatever purpose to external keyboards and that same rack.  

So, that’s the story.  More to follow as I actually start using the thing.