Moog Music Forum

I was really struggling to get the Sub 37 arp/seq to sync directly to a couple of my other keyboards that have arpeggiators and sequencers. I would have another keyboard playing some sequence and generating MIDI sync, I would turn on the Sub 37 Sync button, press a key, and nothing, just silence. After a few days of trying this and that, a happy accident happened and I noticed that I had to turn the arp 'ON' button off and back on again and then I could hit a key and everything worked. It would continue working through patch changes until the Sub 37 was turned off and back on and then the arp off/on steps has to be repeated. I noticed that if I used MIDI-OX to send MIDI Sync clock messages, the Sub 37 always worked as expected, but MIDI-OX also sends 'Start' and 'Stop' messages whereas my other keyboards just send the MIDI clock messages continuously with no Start/Stop.

So it appears that if the Sub 37 is going to be the receiver, and the sender does not send Start/Stop, the arpeggiator section has to be turned off and back on in order to internally trigger a 'Start'. That's an easy enough workaround but it would be nice if it was documented since I had no idea what I was doing wrong. Have others noticed this? Is there perhaps a menu setting that modifies this behaviour?

I remember that the internal triggering of midi start by turning the arp on was added in 1.0.4. Prior to 1.0.4 a start had to be received from the external device. The functionality probably never made it into the manual. I don't know of any menu options to control this.

This is the quote from that update ...

The change in this version with external clock sync is: if you switch ON the arp/sequencer while external clock is detected, it will just run. If you then send a MIDI STOP, it will wait for a MIDI START message before running again... but in the absence of a Stop command being received, the arp will now run on external sync as long as it is receiving clock; it no longer requires a Start message to kick it off.

Seems like an oversight to not document that in the manual or an extra addendum sheet or an online document. It's such basic MIDI functionality. And I don't see that 1.0.4 update listed anymore in the download section so those notes are not even available online anymore.

Speaking of which, are there any other features like that from earlier updates that are no longer available online and not documented anywhere else?