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I have a tc electronic g major gathering dust for quite some time now. The problem is that due to its heavy use over the years lot of knobs etc are broken. But otherwise the unit works perfectly fine. So in order to program it I need an editor.

However ,although I searched extensively in order to find one I couldn't. Everything seems out of date and does not work. As a result I am thinking of creating my own editor on Max/MSP.

Now the problem is that I can't find any good documentation on tc electronic's sysex. By asking around I found that the preset request message should be,

in hex: F0 00 20 1f 00 48 45 (01-7F) 00 or 01 F7

which in dec is: 240 0 32 31 0 72 69 114 0 247

When I put this on Max/MSP everything works fine: I get a 614 long array which represents the patch I m requesting. Moreover I understand on which position is the numerical representation of each effect block etc. What I can't figure out however is how long a sysex message should be in order to let's say turn off or on an effects block ( for instance the reverb). And how to figure out the number for each effects block Any help is really appreciated as I am totally lost due to the lack of documentation. I really hope to be able to finish it and share it as a Max for live device in order to be working with Ableton live Any ideas?

p.s I send to tc electronic and they told me that the sysex documentation is not available anywhere

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  • Boo! to TC for not having the docs anywhere. Sysex is still alive & well. I Googled the manual, & it has about the poorest midi spec documentation I've seen for a device :( I found this - squest.com/Products/MidiQuest11/Instruments/… any use? – Tetsujin May 29 '15 at 17:54
  • Thanks oft the reply. However the editor you are suggesting is for g major 2 . I have the first version and unfortunately doesn't work with that. However I download it cause it has a good monitor and I tried to reverse engineer it by pressing buttons on sysex and see what values I get. I only get a three byte value ( which is too small of course) which stands for the delay and the reverb blocks. Finally I found this program realmajor.haax.se however is a little bit old and it works only for one or two changes, afterwards I have to close/open the device – tim.a May 31 '15 at 7:36
  • ah, sorry. Trying to figure out sysex by hand with no reference as to what each block is for is not an easy task. TC really should have written this down somewhere - in fact they had to have done & probably still have it, but no-one has ever digitised it. I used to work for a rival company - everything we did was a) in the original manual & b) still available online, even 15 - 25 years later. You need to yell at someone & get them to dig out the original spec for you ;-) – Tetsujin May 31 '15 at 7:50
  • Please keep us updated if you manage to make that editor ;-) This question about reverse engineering sysex might be to some help: sound.stackexchange.com/questions/23983/… – Michael Hansen Buur Sep 15 '15 at 8:53
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I am aware that this is not a direct answer, however if the main problem is that your knobs are broken and you want a patch editor for the T.C. Electronic G-Major, take a look at these editors.

You may also be able to contact the authors and get some info from them about the sysex format:

GLydian: http://www.rig-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11963

GLydian Patch Editor

Real Major: http://realmajor.haax.se/index.htm

enter image description here

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