Last year I ordered a Meeblip (the easily assembled kit) and I’ve been in love with this little grey box ever since! It is simply one of the most affordable and fun hardware synths (that actually sounds great) that you can buy right now. I use it mostly for bass sounds, but it can just as easy do great lo-fi leads as well.

One issue I ran into some time back was that while the unit would respond great to MIDI from a keyboard controller like my Novation boards, I just couldn’t get it to respond predictably to MIDI notes when played from a clip in Ableton Live. I tried experimenting with channel settings, offsets and gate lengths but nothing helped. The box would only catch ever 20th note or so.

Yesterday I sold my Novation SL MKii 49 to finance a new reverb unit (Lexicon MX400, more on that later) and so today I was cleaning out some MIDI settings in Live. When I did, I noticed that the Meeblip was set to receive MIDI Sync (as in clock) from Live, with seemed unnecessary so I turned it off, and behold, the MIDI notes now trigger exactly as expected.

I double checked by turning the Sync out ON again, and the problem immediately returned, so I’m pretty sure this was indeed the problem. I’m not sure why the Meeblip isn’t just ignoring the Clock, but apparently it confuses the MIDI note / trigger / gate implementation in the box, so turn it off if your Meeblip is not responding as expected.