I will know more Wednesday when it arrives. The issue is this. The MIDI in on the Roland box is spoken for. However, that is just a matter of me being so lazy that I like to wire stuff up and never have to touch it again. To use MIDI for clock I would have to change cables and unplug the keyboard controlling the module and plug a MIDI cable it from the drumx to the module. It's not fatal, but, ya know....

And as is my addictive personality, I want to gather stuff and may use this once or twice and forget about it. I have a couple of Alan Parsons-ish things I want to do which will have that persistent synth arpeggio playing throughout, so it has to stay in lock step with the drums or it will sound as bad as how it sounds when I play manually!

I came to terms LONG ago with being an impulse buyer and having no regard for money whatsoever. This drum box was $150 and I don't care. I mean this is a guy who once grabbed a commuter flight to NYC to have pizza for lunch at Ray's and then flew right back on the same commuter flight.

The San Diego story you don't even want to know about...

BUT back to topic, this will be an interesting experiment trying to make this stuff do what I want it to do. I have actually only had a MIDI cable plugged into my interface once, and that was for the vocoder experiment where I wanted to record the keyboard inputs that the vocoder would sing, play them back with a cable from interface MIDI out to vocoder MIDI in and then just sing the part into a mic (which worked fine), but other than that, what MIDI parts I do use are all in the box. Most of my MIDI experiences was real time on the rig I played on. I had an MX-8 MIDI patch bay that was a marvel of technology and I was able to control any of 6 sound sources from any of 3 controllers. Programming it was an exercise I can best describe as crossing the River Styx in an aluminum fishing boat, but eventually I got it done and it was great. I had 11 different setups stored (out of 50 available) and a Roland remote patch changed, so when I needed setup 3 I just had to put in 3 and hit enter and it changed all the boards and routings. Oh, and the right discs in the samplers. I don't think I could even draw up how it was all wired and routed 30 years later. That and getting used to patch numbers in raw MIDI, how patch 1 is 0, etc. That got weird with bank 3 patch 8 being patch 23 in raw MIDI. I literally had to draw numbers on paper to get them right. And all the synths were different!! The Ensoniqs had banks of 10, the Yamaha TX-81z I don't even remember, the samplers, though both Ensoniq were different. I think it took me like 12 days to get that done, because in addition to patch numbers I had to go through every song and figure out that the EPS would be a master and play horns and control the Mirage in the rack, playing different horns. Or that for What's Goin' On I needed a tuned bell sound mixed with slow attacking strings and a vocal aaah patch in the TX-81. But, I won! And I will win with this too.