The other day a friend and I experimented with connecting his excellent monotribe (with the miditribe extension) to my Cubase to see if we could record the MIDI-signals coming from it. For Science! This made me realize that, being a MIDI-noob, I hadn't understood how MIDI worked in Cubase, and none of my google searches seemed to help either, since being a MIDI-noob, I probably didn't have the right vocabulary to specify the searches with.

The thing is that the 'tribe is supposed to send the synth MIDI on CH 1 and the drums on CH 10. We added two midi tracks in cubase and selected the channels we wanted in the track info. Like so:

This did not work, as we got a mix of drums and synths at once all over the place. Interesting, but not right. To try to understand this we created a default project with 16 MIDI tracks, one per channel, and lo and behold all MIDI was sent to all channels.

OK. We figured we needed to filter out just the channel needed per channel so we added a MIDI insert called "Transformer" and tried to filter out only the channels wanted, i.e. CH 1 for MIDI track 1, CH 2 for track 2 etc. This didn't work either, so we gave up and recorded a song about microwave ovens using the sound from the monotribe (syncronized via MIDI), a monotron duo, GrooveAgent One, Retrologue, a Squire bass guitar, an Epiphone guitar, and our voices. (This will show up on our SoundCloud stream sooner or later. UPDATE: It has.)

Later in the evening I revisited the problem and found the button called "Input Transformer". The yellowish guy on the right here:

If you choose "Local" you get to a window like so and you can choose a preset for filtering MIDI channels:

Voilà. This lets you filter only the channel(s) you want to record from an interface, so that you can indeed record one channel on one track and one channel on another track.

Maybe there are other, better, ways of doing this (?), but this seems to do the trick.

Ah, and the channel selection from the two first screen shots are the channels that are sent to the things receiving data from the MIDI track.

Another time I'll tell you about how I almost deleted most of the tracks I have recorded since Steinberg changed their "save project to new folder"-function (the last two-three years or so)...