When I visited a client in London, his Roland TB-03 was following Logic Pro’s MIDI clock but not playing any of the notes Logic sent it, and the cause was the synth’s global MIDI channel setting.
The TB-03 is Roland’s recreation of the TB-303. He had it connected to his Mac Studio through an iConnectivity mioXL MIDI interface, with a 5-pin DIN MIDI cable from the interface’s MIDI out. The TB-03’s sequencer responded to Logic’s clock, but when Logic sent it MIDI notes the synth didn’t play anything.
Because the clock was getting through, I took it that the hardware was connected properly and the MIDI cable was working. So the question was why the notes weren’t playing.
I looked through the manual for any setting that changes which kind of MIDI input the synth listens to. Some synths can be set to recognise only USB MIDI and ignore the DIN socket, which might have been the problem, but I couldn’t find any reference to that in the TB-03’s manual. The only relevant thing I could see was the global MIDI channel, so I thought it was worth checking what that was set to.
Pressing Function with the right combination of buttons shows the global MIDI channel. It was set to channel 2. I set it to channel 1 and his music started playing through the TB-03.
The TB-03 was listening for notes on MIDI channel 2, while Logic’s External Instrument was sending them on channel 1.
Making the channel stick
Changing the channel on the synth got the notes through, but I wanted to know whether the TB-03 would remember it after being switched off and on again. We did a quick test, turning it off and back on, and it lost the setting.
So I changed the External Instrument in Logic to send on channel 2 instead of channel 1, and the TB-03 started playing again. I then saved that as an External Instrument preset in the Logic template we were building for him, so it always comes up with that setting, which should solve the problem in the long term as well.
When a hardware synth answers your DAW’s clock but ignores its notes, compare the MIDI channel on both ends, and if the synth forgets its channel at power-off, set the channel in your DAW and save it in your template.
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