Hello all, I’m wondering if it is possible to snap two grid controllers together and then use the USC-C outs from both units to send MIDI to two different places at once? One of the cables would go the the USB host on my Bluebox and provide power, the other would send regular USB MIDI to a synth or fx box. Is this possible? Thanks!
Heyas! Welcome to the forum!
I’m only speculating here but I would think that, the way the controllers are designed, there’s likely not a way to send MIDI out more than 1 USB connection. There’s no means that I know of that would let you route the output of specific control elements to different outputs. The only way it would be achieved would be to send the MIDI from both modules out both USB connections at the same time. Doubling the information sent across the modules would almost certainly cause problems.
Also, there is logic baked into the controllers that let the system know the position and rotation of each module relative to the USB connection. I don’t think the controllers are fundamentally designed to work with multiple USB outputs.
You would have to do MIDI routing outside of the Grid system unless you dedicate one Grid controller to Bluebox and another two your non-Bluebox devices. The 1010Bluebox doesn’t seem to support MIDI Thru and it looks like it only has USB MIDI capabilities.
If you have a Raspberry Pi kicking around, you can set it up as a USB MIDI host/router using this project:
All you need is a Pi3 or Pi4. Literally just flash an SD card , put it in the Pi, and you’re off to the races. Your synths and pedals, if they support USB MIDI, would just plug into the Pi. I’ve used this in the studio for quite some time and it’s been super stable.
There’s only been one edge case that I had to try and work around but it’s pretty rare. The script that auto-connects all of your MIDI devices doesn’t have code to map multiple virtual MIDI ports. So, I think it was my Launchpad Pro MK3 (or MIDI Fighrer Twister) that has two virtual MIDI ports. The default port is used for connecting to DAWs where the second port was used for ‘standard’ mode. I could just plug it in and have it auto map because of this. It’s a very rare case to run into but the only thing I had to try and muck around with the script with.
Hey there!
Grid always broadcasts on all connected cables, but it’s also a device that needs to be hosted for that to work. So if the secondary device is unable to Host the second Grid in its USB port, it will not be able to receive MIDI at all.
For these use-cases we usually recommend using a USB-MIDI Host device like our Knot which hosts Grid and converts USB MIDI to traditional MIDI cables.
Thank you both so much for your detailed and helpful replies!