Dear all,

I am re-setting up my studio after a few years hiatus.  I was an active member of motifator, but I took some years off due to moving, getting remarried, having kids...you know...life!

Anywhoot, I have been stock piling some gear over the years in addition to the stuff that I already had in my studio, before life happened.  I just took some time today to put everything together the way it was from what I remembered, but the key components are not working!  Go figure!  Could someone please walk me through the steps bit by bit in setting up my studio using a yamaha motif es8, a yamaha i88x, cubase 4, and windows xp.  My computer is really tricked out for my music, so I know that it is good.  Bad Mister helped me out with this before, and he was even nice enough to send me pics of the graphic patch bay for my set up with instruction on how to set it up.  He did this for me around 2007.  I couldn’t retrieve it from the archives, because I guess I have been off for too long.  But please walk me through what I have to do.  You can start with connections to each other via hardware all the way to the set up in cubase 4...that would be a gigantic help.  As I ahve it connected now, I have the yamaha motif es8 connected to the i88x via firewire cable.  The i88x is connected to the computer via firewire cable.  So they are daisy chained to the computer.  I have a Blue spark microphone connected to the channel 2 input in the front of the i88x.  The issue I am having is connecting everything using the mLan driver and how it runs to Cubase.  I need help.  Thanks and God bless in advance!!!!

Welcome back! You still have nice gear, I’m sorry that I didn’t buy i88x at that time, since I still using ES with mLAN, than load recorder project into the another Cubase version where I have Yamaha Stenberg drivers (both FireWire and USB). When you want to connect ES and i88x in daisy chain, you should at first install mLAN driver (the latest version for XP is 1.63 and you could find it at download.yamaha.com). Than, you should connect i88x via FireWire cable plugged into to port 1 of i88x and wait till your computer recognized it.
Next step is to connect port 2 on i88x to port 1 on ES via FireWire cable and to power up ES. Now your system should recognize both devices and you should be ready to go.
In order to have rerouted your connections using Graphic Patch bay, you should let us know what channels you are using and for what purposes. But, I think that graphical representation is pretty intuitive so you could solve it by your self.
One suggestion, instead of using Cubase 4, you should move to Cubase 6 AI since it has much more features and it could still operate on XP. If you want my opinion, I’m using Win 7 32bit with Cubase 7.5 and mLAN driver on one hard disk and on another SSD (primary disk) I have Win 7 64bit and Cubase 8 pro. But there mLAN driver could not be correctly installed, so I use that configuration with FW16 installed in Rack XS and Yamaha Steinberg FireWire or with MOXF with Yamaha Steinberg USB driver.

Alex