Tutorial

The tutorial will take you through a number of the more common procedures in Midi Quest. The intent is to get you comfortable with how the program operates along with some of the features you will use most often. After this, you can begin to explore the program more fully. The following is a basic outline of what we will be doing:

Load Your Hardware Instrument Into a Midi Quest Instrument

At this point, we are assuming that you have followed the steps in the installation and installed one or more instrument modules and used the Settings dialog to properly assign the MIDI ports and SysEx and MIDI channels for each installed instrument module.

We will begin by loading the contents of one of your instruments into Midi Quest. This will not only provide your first view of how SysEx is stored in Midi Quest, it will also allow you to verify that the Studio has been properly configured to communicate with your instruments.

For the first test, you should begin by selecting a full synthesizer that Midi Quest has editors for. Try not to select a drum machine, effect box, patch bay, or other MIDI device. If you have a number of different brands of instruments to choose from, try choosing an instrument not made by Roland (if you are using a Roland D-series instrument). If you have only Roland products, choose the newest instrument you own. We are not anti-Roland here, however, Roland D-series products have substantially more bugs in their instrument ROMs than any other manufacturer and we would prefer that you get Midi Quest up and running as smoothly as possible.

Now that you have selected an instrument module in the Studio, tap the Get button on the Studio button bar and Midi Quest will begin the process of loading SysEx from the hardware into the Midi Quest instrument.

Understanding MIDI I/O

During bulk SysEx loads from the hardware into a Midi Quest, Midi Quest will display SysEx transfer information including the type of SysEx being loaded, the MIDI ports being used for the transfer and the number of bytes received. A completion bar will also fill as bytes are received.

If you have set all of the instrument parameters correctly using the Settings dialog and you have properly set up the instrument to receive and transmit SysEx (see the instrument's Fast Tips help for instructions), you will see the bar at the bottom of the window fill as SysEx is transferred.

Providing that everything proceeds without a problem, you have now saved a system backup for the instrument in Midi Quest.

To verify that the SysEx has been successfully loaded, double tap on the instrument in the Studio to open the editor to view and review the loaded SysEx. To return to the Studio, tap the Back "<" button in the instrument editor.

To send this snapshot from disk back to your instrument, select instrument and tap the Put button on the Studio button bar.