Adding MIDI Thru?

[mikelpanky]

I have a few pieces of gear with MIDI In and Out, but no Thru. It's rather inhibiting in my signal chain. Isn't there some way I can convert the out to a thru? Like a box that I plug the Out into and it spits out a Thru port?

[evildragon]

http://www.midisolutions.com/prodthr.htm

http://www.midisolutions.com/prodqth.htm

http://www.midisolutions.com/prodt8.htm

 

 

Choose your size

[mikelpanky]

Boom. Appreciate that. I should have thought to check MS but I guess I didn't. Thanks!

[AnotherScott]

 

I have a few pieces of gear with MIDI In and Out, but no Thru. It's rather inhibiting in my signal chain. Isn't there some way I can convert the out to a thru? Like a box that I plug the Out into and it spits out a Thru port?

 

On some boards/modules, you can change a setting to turn an OUT Into a THRU. Otherwise, you would accomplish what you want, not by changing a board's OUT to a THRU, but rather, by putting multiple OUTS on a device that is earlier in the chain, by using a MIDI Thru box, which turns a single MIDI Out into multiple MIDI Outs. MIDI Solutions make them, and lots of other companies have made them in the past, you'll find them on eBay all the time. So then, instead of going from device A to device B to device C as you would if device B had a THRU port, you'd go from device A to the THRU box, and then from the THRU box directly to both devices B and C.

 

You can also find programmable versions of these things in MIDI patchbays, like Yamaha MEP4 and Digital Music MX8... unfortunately, long out of production, but they do turn up on eBay.

[JeffLearman]

 

On some boards/modules, you can change a setting to turn an OUT Into a THRU.

On some, you can enable MIDI Merge, which makes the OUT the combination of input plus whatever MIDI is generated on the keyboard. That can be useful, but it adds some MIDI latency. Usually it's not much (1 ms) but it can add up if there are many links in the MIDI daisy chain.

 

I suspect that some boards that let you turn OUT into a THRU might also suffer from added latency.

 

An extra ms or two of latency doesn't usually bother me. YMMV. If that's a problem, the devices listed above solve it simply and effectively.