dave han wrote:
>
> How would you sync it with a 606? any ideas?
>
You'd need something to convert Roland DIN Sync to MIDI, or the other
way round.
Now, this is probably easier than it sounds. There are lots of little
microcontrollers on the market with a UART and various I/O pins. If you
wanted to use the 606 as master, you'd set the microcontroller up so
that the clock pin fired an interrupt, which would set a MIDI Clock byte
(0xf8) out through the UART. Another line would be wired to the
start/stop line. When it goes high, send the start message (0xfa) and
when it goes low send... can you guess? The stop message (0xfc).
Slightly more useful would be receiving the MIDI bytes, pulsing the
clock output pin when 0xf8 is received, and setting or resetting the
start/stop pin when 0xfa or 0xfc is received. It might be worth
including 0xfb for continue, but I don't think the 606 supports that.
Note that since MIDI Clock is sent at 24ppqn (pulses per quarter note)
you could count pulses and toggle other pins to send clocks at different
rates - for instance an arpeggiator trigger that sent semiquavers would
require six counts, quavers 12 and crotchets would need 24. For other
note lengths you could count different amounts - 18 would be a dotted
quaver.
I really don't have time to come up with a hardware design or actually
write the code for this right now, but a bit of googling should turn up
some good places to start. If anyone fancies a challenge I'll be glad
to help out.
Gordon