Using a Plantwave's Semi-Random MIDI Output Just Because

This video shouldn't have taken as long as it did, but it sort of bridges the gap between the last video and the next one. It literally took a month and a half for me to figure out how to get the MIDI output on this thing to work properly, so everything came to a screeching halt.
The whole process has been maddening. For one thing, the Android app blatantly lies about the OS version you need to be on (it says Android 8, but it needs a minimum of Android 12 and this ~still~ hasn't been fixed). I had to buy a used iPhone 6 just to meet the minimum standard. That was hurdle one, which I didn't even bother getting into in the video. Hurdle two was the apparent incompatibility between my MIDI input device and the 3.5mm to 5-pin MIDI connector, which I bought from the company specifically so that it'd be the right type and work without any headaches.
I don't know why routing the midi through the Kawai GMega fixes it, but my guess is that the Plantwave (or possibly the 3.5mm MIDI output-this is the first device I've used that doesn't use 5-pin MIDI) is doing something fancy that the GMega happily ignores when sending the signal back out, resulting in a sanitized MIDI signal that my input is happy with.
Not sure who looked at MIDI and went, "Wow, this is straightforward! Let's complicate it with dueling MIDI type A and B standards and bizarre idiosyncrasies! It'll be fun to watch numerical UA-cam randos get frothy with rage trying to figure out why the thing isn't doing the thing!"
It didn't help that I decided to make a track using just the Plantwave after that. I was already fried, and the sticky sensors refused to believe that I was alive and produce sound for whatever reason, so I had to stick the pokey sensors into my fingers for minutes at a time to get a few seconds of usable material. This one's entirely on me doing an Icarus and flying too close to the sun.
The Plantwave is pretty cool once everything is working and the vein in your head is no longer at risk of popping so hard that it creates a black hole. The app's default sounds lean into that "relaxing calmness" vibe when used casually, and the way its MIDI output tends to sweep up and down on a macro scale but with interesting micro deviations makes it pretty useful for little MIDI flourishes.
Is it 300 dollars worth of cool for the average producer, or even an enthusiastic one with more money than sense? Probably not, to be honest. This is geared more toward hippie types with Scrooge McDuck rooms overflowing with healing crystals, though obviously it also appeals to people like me who just enjoy bouncing around from weird thing to weird thing, absorbing any inspiration available to be vacuumed up like some kind of creativity vampire. That doesn't mean it's not pretty cool; it's just a hard sell in a world where MIDI generators can do something similar with less hassle for significantly less money.
But hey, if you already have one for whatever reason and were looking for ways of getting more out of it, maybe this could give you some ideas. Both BlueARP and midiSwing are free. I also used Scaler to snap the twinkly bells and horn-sounding synth notes to a minor scale, but I could have done that in the settings on the app, so using it was an act of sheer laziness rather than necessity.
Something I neglected to delve into in the video is why I moved stuff around in BlueARP. Normally, that determines which note of a chord it triggers, but since notes overlap randomly instead of consistently, it essentially acts as a way of silencing midi on some beats so that the drums aren't constantly machine-gunning away; if K2 or K3 roll around and only one note is playing, then no midi will be triggered on that beat. This was mainly important because of the arbitrary "5 successive notes have to remain intact" rule I set for myself here, and also just a personal preference of how I like my tracks to sound.
The specific timestamps I list in-video might be a off by a second. Different playback methods (in my NLE, a media player, or UA-cam) each measure the timing a little differently, so it's really hard to mention specific moments in-video. 5:43 should probably be 5:42. And a half.
If you pause at just the right time when I'm highlighting midiSwing, you can see that all my presets are named after sugary foods. I very quickly ran out of bouncy sugary names and started phoning it in with, like, grapes and biscuits. If you theme your preset names, don't be too proud to Google stuff when you run out of stuff that immediately comes to mind. Creativity is hard and nobody wants a biscuit preset.
#plantwave
TIMESTAMP TIME IT'S TIMESTAMP TIME, Y'ALL
0:00 - 1:52 - Showing off the Plantwave as most people seem to use it
1:52 - 4:19 - The saga of getting the MIDI output to work
4:19 - 5:06 - Figuring out how to use it in a track without any other MIDI sources
5:06 - 6:43 - The song and conclusions about how to use it best
6:43 - 7:00 - A stuffed octopus outro

[@vollofi]

the plant wants a cigarette after that 🥬🚬

[@plonzz]

the goat uploaded again!!!!

[@TheCreepypro]

I didn't know about any of this and now that I do I think it is way cool and I am glad I know

[@plonzz]

do you have a discord server?

[@227]

Like one specifically for this channel or something? Not right now, no, but you can usually find me on there hanging around the Sonic Lab DIscord server. The complaining messages in the video are direct messages sent to @vollofi because we bounce ideas and drafts off of each other.