First Linnstrument gig report and troubleshooting after the fact

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So I know John the Savage is a "real" gigging musician. I am on the other end of the gigging spectrum: indie rock music, not much money involved, but sometimes crowds of people in rooms with not great electricity. Very satisfying but not lucrative.

Saturday night was my first gig with the Linnstrument. It was just a couple songs (I'm normally the bassist) but it is gradually getting more use and will play a bigger and bigger part in our live set as my bandmates love it as a change up.

For this show, I used a DJ TechTools Twister, MacBook Pro 2018, USB-C hub and RME Babyface.

No problems at Soundcheck. The act before us finishes, we go up, I move my gear back to the front of the stage area, plug in the computer and peripherals, and BURP.

The computer (and software) seems fine. The Linnstrument seems to have been completely reset. I'd changed the colours and configured stuff how I wanted it, saved several presets, and it was back to the defaults. Also the MIDI Fighter Twister wasn't receiving MIDI right from my computer, so I had to twist knobs to get it to reflect the settings on the computer.

I'm guessing it was either some kind of power surge from the mains or the MacBook port, or a bad connection with the USB-C to USB-A adapter.

What was GREAT about the Linnstrument is that it took me about 1 minute to re-establish the settings I wanted other than colour, and were able to start just a couple minutes later than planned, and the set went off without a hitch otherwise. Once I set it up again, the Linnstrument was problem-free. So the fix was more or less like dealing with a broken string. Kudos to Roger for such a robust interface.

More importantly, what should I be doing differently to prevent this next time? It's troubleshooting after the fact, I know, but I'd be curious for others' ideas about protecting fancy digital gear from power issues. Nobody at the venue (including a very good live sound engineer) could diagnose the problem and I'm only guessing above.

I'm likely going to be moving to an iPhone/Eurorack setup live from here on out, just because it's more fun for me, but the same issues will apply. I've used digital gear of one sort or another for decades, but this was the first time something like this happened in a gigging situation.

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What are the chances you simply hit one of the 6 "All Settings" buttons on the preset page by accident?

For that matter, do you have your settings saved to one of those memory locations? If not, that would be a good thing to do going forward.

That said, I did have this happen to me once. It was on an older OS mind you; and I did have my settings saved to a preset, so it was a quick, one-button fix. I don't recall off-hand what caused it though. I want to say that it had something to do with yanking the USB cable out, in the middle of setting something up, but I really can't remember.

Cheers!

P.S. I think a gigging musician is a gigging musician, none more "real" than the next (wink).

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Hi Sterne,

I'm sorry about that. I've never heard of that happening before so I'm not sure what could have caused it. (John-- regarding your circumstance, if LinnStrument did a Reset, your 6 'All Settings' presets would also have been reset.)

It could be that you changed from the Left to Right Split across the entire playing surface, which could be done by double-pressing the Split button. That would have appeared to change all of the Per-Split Settings (because the opposite split's settings would then appear) including the color. Do you think that's possible?

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Roger_Linn wrote: Tue Mar 05, 2019 2:06 am John-- regarding your circumstance, if LinnStrument did a Reset, your 6 'All Settings' presets would also have been reset.
Hi Roger,

Yes, of course, I suppose that would be the case, so obviously it couldn't have been a total global reset per se. In lieu of that, my best guess is that somehow the LinnStrument booted up on one of the default factory presets instead. I know it was an older OS, because there were only 4 memory locations, and at the time, I was only using one of them for my own settings; which, as I recall, were in fact retained. As I said, the details of the incident are a little fuzzy at this point. I just remember working on something, accidentally cycling the power (I think I unintentionally pulled the USB cable out), and when I powered it back up, the lights and settings looked to be your factory defaults. All I know is, after throwing a brief temper tantrum, I realized my personally settings were still intact within the preset that I had saved previously. Phew!

At any rate, that was over a year ago, and it hasn't happened since, so... Who knows?

Hence my advice to jsterne to save his settings to a preset location if he hasn't already.

Cheers!

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Hi Folks,

Thanks for your replies. In my case, I had programmed 4 of the 6 presets, and it definitely, for sure, wiped them all. Everything seemed back to defaults.

I know this because I had changed the default blue colour on all of them to a pink and white setup that was more to my liking (for some reason, blue and blue made it harder for me to quickly find where to anchor my hand when switching from bass). And messing it around last night I had to redo customization on others as well. I had it in split mode already, so that wasn't the issue. It could have been a "wrong" unplugging sequence, or a power surge or whatever. It was just a weird thing.

But the interface is so well designed that it felt more like a "broken string" situation than a "computer crash" situation. Actually, it was faster to fix than either once I realized all I needed to do was "reprogram." I was up and running in a minute.

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I don't believe there is any way for the LinnStrument to wake up with one of the "All Settings" presets unintentionally selected, so I suspect something else occurred.

FYI, the All Settings presets feature was created primarily as "training wheels" for people who initially feared not knowing the settings well enough to easily navigate the interface. But most people find no need for them once they learn the settings that they commonly use. For example, I find myself mainly switching between MIDI settings for 1) MPE and 2) Audio Modeling's SWAM instruments, for which I switch between Channel Per Note with Bend Range = 24, and One Channel with Bend Range = 12.

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Well, it happened, whatever the cause... I'm not crazy. Though I suppose that depends on who you ask (smirk). Ahem! And evidently, I'm not alone (wink).

Anyway, despite how well I know the LinnStrument's interface at this point, and no matter how efficient it is to navagate and set up, I definitely have call to use the presets on a regular basis. But then, I use the LinnStrument to control a multitude of different synths, both hardware and software, often in complex technical setups wherein there are too many parameters and behaviours to remember from one song to the next. So, thank you for having the foresight to include those.

And for anyone reading this, who happens to be new to the LinnStrument, I assure you it remains the single most stable piece of high-tech I've ever owned. I play over a 150 gigs a year with it on average, with zero problems to report thus far.

Cheers!
Last edited by John the Savage on Tue Mar 05, 2019 10:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Agreed. It presets allow me to change setups between songs without having to deal with other gear.

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