Planning on taking the OP-1 over to a mates (who is a damn good keyboard player). Hoping to connect a USB keyboard to the OP-1 and trigger its sounds/record the riffs. Now these things are never straight forward (as i cant for the life of me trigger the OP-1 sounds from a piano roll on the ipad). Im guessing this will inevitably cost me money in getting this to work. Whats the best, simplest and most cost effective way of connecting the keyboard to the op-1? Cheers
They keyword is “USB host port”. You can do this with an arduino + usb host shield, a raspberry bi, or some of the iConnect products (not all, you need the USB host port). Simplest way is to get a Kenton MIDI USB host. But unless they keyboard has a MIDI port, you need two USB ports, and Kenton will not do. Or perhaps it supports USB hubs? I don’t know. I have an iConnect Audio 4+, and a USB hub in the host port, so I can plug in 4 midi devices via USB. There’s another long thread on the forum discussion all the options.
If all you are trying to do is what you describe above, then the most cost effective would be to use whatever laptop or computer is available there. Then just find the way that is easiest for you to enable connecting MIDI devices.
If your friend’s keyboard has MIDI DIN ports then you’ll need hardware - to act as a USB Host and to convert the physical interface.
If it has MIDI over USB, then, as @GCF says, you could use a computer as a USB Host, plugging both OP-1 and your friend’s keyboard into the USB ports. In this case you’ll need a piece of software which can route MIDI between the USB ports. A DAW such as Logic will do this. If you don’t have a DAW, then an example of a piece of freeware which does this would be MIDI Patchbay for MacOS. I’m sure someone can advise on equivalents, if you only have access to a Windows PC.