Posted by Brian on January 02, 1999 at 00:24:24:
In Reply to: I'm lost... posted by Harry on January 01, 1999 at 23:51:40:
: I bought my 13 year old son a QS7 for Christmas. We have a decent PC (330 MHz Pentium II). I know very little about the synthesizer and the manual might as well be printed in Russian. We hooked up the QS to the PC with the MIDI cable, provided by the dealer, to the gameport of the PC. I called Alesis and got the scoop on the proper setting to connect to the PC. We cannot record, playback, or for that matter, even get sound. The soundcard in my CPU is listed as a 3D PCI (ESS Solo 1). Any tips, tricks or general information on getting this thing up and running would be greatly appreciated. I'm also looking for a good, basic information source for a layman, such as myself, to begin learning. Thanks.
I'm fairly new to the MIDI game too, but here's some hints that may or may not help you out. There is no sound carried by the MIDI cables themselves. Just note on/off messages and others. So, the soundcard will not actually be playing the sounds, the synth will. So I guess my first question would be do you have the audio out of the synth plugged into an amp and speakers(you can also use headphones)? Secondly, do you have your sequencing software configured properly? Is it set to send/receive MIDI? Thirdly, do you have the MIDI cables hooked up correctly?(IN-->OUT, OUT-->IN) Is there anything I've missed?
There's a great resource called Beginner's Synth FAQ located at http://tilt.largo.fl.us/faq/synthfaq.html. That should keep you occupied for a couple of hours and answer a bunch of questions. Also try out The Best of MIDI at http://www.student.wau.nl/~olivier/midi/index.htm.