The Empress Zoia is the brain of my pedalboard. However, I was frustrated by not being able to use it to control my Meris Enzo via MIDI, as apparently an extra device (Meris MIDI I/O box) was needed. Meh. No way I am going to pay an extra 100 bucks for that, not to mention waste precious pedalboard space.
I started wondering if the control input in the Meris used some some proprietary protocol produced by their MIDI I/O box or just plain MIDI. I did some research and ran into the DisasterArea’s MIDI Box 4 page. In the compatibility section, it says it supports the Enzo using a mono TS cable, and apparently the signal goes on the tip of the cable:
Then I went to the Zoia manual to see what options I had on that side. I had my Zoia’s MIDI connectors already busy controlling other stuff, so I looked into the CPort section in page 28 and found this:
Interesting. It seemed that Zoia’s CPort could be used as a second MIDI output, which would come through the ring.
So a custom cable TRS cable that bridges the ring on the Zoia side to the tip on the Enzo side should work. Right? I decided to give it a try. I went and built that cable and voilà! It works!!!
The cable should look like this:
It works like a charm! Just make sure you configure your CPort for MIDI and you use the same MIDI channel in your MIDI output modules and in your Enzo. I use this cable along a Zoia patch/page I created that includes all of Enzo’s MIDI parameters. It allows me to store a preset for the Enzo along with each of Zoia’s patches. You can find the patch in Patchstorage here. And here you can see it in action: