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One last question: (hopefully). I have read that external devices cannot control the K-Pro via MIDI. I'm more interested in going the other way - running an Electribe or an Evolver from the K-Pro. Is that do-able?

your question is really too vague to be properly answered. certainly you can control certain aspects of the electribe from a kpro. what are you interested in doing?

one of most poorly thought out design decision of the kpro is that you need to be in external control mode to play notes on an external device. in this mode you lose access to the looping/recording. pretty weak imo.

I'm just hoping to keep the main K-Pro pattern in sync with them, nothing more. Not worried about actual notes (or looping or recording), just patterns and beats.

frankly, judging from the sync problems in the kp3 and the similarity of the devices, i wouldn't expect one to sync proper with *anything* without prior confirmation.
i'm sure somebody knows for sure but i don't have kpro.

Well, worst case scenerio, I can treat it like my old Kaossilator (with all the new sounds and features). My normal process was to link the two electribes with the Evolver and then freeform (or whatever the term would be) guitar and Kaossilator if I used both. I am planning to use some of the percussion features on the K-Pro, so proper syncing would be nice. I know you can set the beats per minute as well, but that's a bit trickier to line up.

kp3 doesn't support start/stop midi commands. i doubt the kpro does either. neither one has a quantize function of any kind. i think the only thing to be gained out of syncing them together is you can turn one bpm knob and have the bpm change on the other device.

Does anyone know how the KPro performs when it's in sync as the slave to something else's MIDI clock?

I haven't gotten mine yet (found a new one online for $360), but here's a part of the original post in this thread:

6. Bad Midi-Implementation:
- no midi-note-out in normal mode
- in external mode you have midi-note-out with key and scale but no arp so this kills the fun playing external Synth!
- via Midi in you cannot play notes on the KPro with a normal Midi-keyboard attached.
- No start/stop-synchronisation

If I'm interpreting this correctly, it sounds like it can operate as a MIDI slave, but with limitations. I'll find out! Again, I'd like to have this work, but I could live without it, as described above.

The inability to trigger the KPro's synth without a computer is very annoying but I'm thinking of getting a PadKontrol (apparently the only thing able to control it) to take full advantage of the synth capabilities.

As for syncing, I was just thinking that the KPro might behave and follow something else's timing lead better than it leads other things, so I could still have more than one device kept in time. Obviously.

I wasn't planning on using the MIDI much at first, but I might want to in the future. I'm not happy about the fact that the synth is turned off when external control is on - that makes zero sense to me. I'm wondering if anyone knows if this product might help people wanting to use MIDI, both in and out. It's a free download:

http://www.midiox.com/

BTW - I'm a little confused by these two statements -

in external mode you have midi-note-out with key and scale but no arp so this kills the fun playing external Synth! - from the OP. And this, from MusicRadar.com:

It does, however, enable you to control other synths with its touchpad through External Control Mode, but the KO-Pro's synth and looping is disabled in this mode.

I'm too thick to decipher exactly what I can control with MIDI going out to a drum machine or synth. Would the K-Pro simply go silent while you play your other synthesizer with the touch pad?

-> 4dnightmare wrote: I'm too thick to decipher exactly what I can control with MIDI going out to a drum machine or synth. Would the K-Pro simply go silent while you play your other synthesizer with the touch pad?

I own a KPro and there are two modes:

1. The normal KPro-Loop-Mode were you kaossilate your internal synth.
In this mode your movements on the pad are send as CC-Midi-Controllers.
X-Movement send for example CC12 0-127 and Y-Movement CC13 0-127.
You can configure the Controller numbers with the Editor. So you can send it to the midi in of your DAW (like Logic) and map the X for example to a Filter-Cutoff and Y to something else. That is fine - but YOU CANNOT play a note on your softsynth - because it's not possible to configure the sending of notes instead of ContolerChanges (CC).

2. The External Control Mode. In this mode the KPro is just a dumb midi controller which sends notes on the x-axis and every slider sends CC-commands - but you have no internal synth and no looper functionality.

Thank you for all the good information. They certainly bypass all those important facts when they advertise that it has MIDI in and out on their website. I would consider that to be borderline false advertising. Setting up the MIDI between the Electribes and the Evolver takes about a minute.

At least it seems to produce a pretty good sound when the MIDI is used internally, as I've heard and seen on some YouTube videos. I don't have a DAW or a laptop - just two old Electribes, an Evolver and a desktop computer. I will have to do a lot of self-educating; does the manual cover this? I wasn't planning on using MIDI to use external sources to the K-Pro, only the other way around. And looping is something I'll use primarily with the internal editor, most likely. I mainly want to play a drum pattern or such on the PRO and send it to an Electribe or Evolver (mostly the Electribe drum machine).

EDITED: This guy does a nice job of explaining exactly what you said, but the visuals help folks like me!

http://www.youtube.com/user/sonicstate# ... AXAJiYLoZg

(the part about MIDI starts a bit after the six minute mark)

Well, mine arrived today. After all that, I checked the manual, set it for MIDI out, channel 1, set my Evolver for MIDI in, channel 1, inserted the MIDI cord and they worked in perfect sync.

Glad to hear it.

I tried playing an MC-303 along with a KPro today. They were out of sync within a few bars.

I didn't have a lot of time to dink around with it because I was at my son's Honor Society presentation (proud dad bowing here), but the only thing I haven't gotten to function correctly in the short amount of time I had to work with it was the vocorder. No matter how I routed my microphone - with or without phantom power, with or without other processors - I couldn't get a sound. I saw the peak light moving, but nothing but garble. On my way to search the forums for a fix.....

Thanks everyone!