(not a bug) Sustain pedal not released on Stop

[Jeremy Murray-Wakefield]

[Later edit: I thought this was a bug, but apparently this is within spec.]

When you press Stop on a MIDI track, the sustain pedal is not released and so external synths will continue to sound if the sustain pedal had been down in that part of the MIDI track.

This can of course be mitigated by enabling "Zero Controllers When Play Stops" but surely Sustain Pedal should be a special case that does not require this - even if optionally? It is often not practical to have "Zero Controllers When Play Stops" enabled due to the way some things are set-up.

Another solution would be to have a tickable option to send "All Notes Off" on Stop (which curiously is sent to VST synths, non-optionally).

In the mean time - to solve my immediate problem - does anyone know if there is a setting in a file anywhere that would either force pedal-up on stop or cause an "all notes off" to be sent? (I've tried "MFX Sustain Fix" from TenCrazy but it has undesireable side-effects).

 

Edited January 3, 2022 by Jeremy Murray-Wakefield

[bvideo]

I don't know the answer and I don't disagree with your suggestion, but in the absence of the "all notes off" option, maybe there is some existing workaround to whatever issues you have with "Zero Controllers...". Can you describe a situation that zero controllers messes things up?

[Jeremy Murray-Wakefield]

Sure. A typical example is where a particular synth preset uses the mod wheel to balance between layers or to set the filter cutoff.

Once set, you want it left alone - but pressing Stop slams it back down to zero. Native Instruments Absynth is an example where pressing Stop on some presets can completely change the sound. I'm not sure if it's only CC1 that causes this issue or whether other controller #s are involved. 

[msmcleod]

This isn't a bug - Zero All Controllers is the MIDI standard for dealing with this.

The only reason people have started disabling this is due to Native Instruments hijacking CC #1  (modulation) for things like cut-off freq / volume.  Why they did this, who knows, but it was a very bad idea.

I've just got used to pressing and releasing my sustain pedal when this happens, or hitting the panic button.
 

[Jeremy Murray-Wakefield]

My apologies - despite using MIDI since it first came out, I never knew this - very interesting!
A quick search reveals how this affects Ableton Live too: https://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?t=243036 

 

 

[bvideo]

So when the transport gets stopped, those sounds won't match how you set them with those controllers. The "chase" setting should put them back where they should be wherever you restart, but if you want to play those instruments or edit notes, etc., after stopping the transport, they won't sound right. Come to think of it, it's kind of inconvenient to have controllers modifying sound when you go to edit at different points in the timeline.

 

[Jeremy Murray-Wakefield]

You’re assuming that the controller positions are recorded in the timeline. That’s only true if they are moved during a recorded performance or are hand-drawn in. 

When used for sound editing however there is no record of their original positions after they are reset. 

Fortunately it seems like only pitch and mod wheel are reset by Cakewalk, with the rest dependent on what the synth chooses to do with “Reset All Controllers”. 

The synth is free to ignore it if it so chooses. 
 

[msmcleod]

Back in the old days, I used Music-X on the amiga, and I used to manually insert my program changes & CC events  ( normally volume, pan, expression, pitch bend & modulation & sustain pedal ) at the start of every "section" (e.g. intro, verse, chorus etc).

I'd bounce the whole sequence down to an Alesis DataDisk, and then take it to the studio and plug it into the ADAT BRC.

Because the program changes / CC events were specified at each section, I could start the ADAT at any point within a song and it would correctly pick it up and start playing in sync almost immediately using the correct sounds / CC settings.

For me this just became a necessary part of my workflow with MIDI.  

It's not something I worry about as much nowadays with VSTi's, as they tend to have their own track and pan/volume are generally controlled on the audio track. But if I'm using some Kontakt instruments, I still put pitch bend/modulation events at the beginning if necessary,  and I'm extra careful about sustain pedal events in piano parts when cutting / pasting.
 

[scook]

Not being very sophisticated when it comes to CC data. I wonder if this makes the case for "zero controllers" being a per-track option or overriding the global setting per track.

[Jeremy Murray-Wakefield]

38 minutes ago, msmcleod said:

Back in the old days, I used Music-X on the amiga

[Monty Python voice:]

"Amiga? Luxury! When I were a lad, we'd record our sequences into a UMI Sequencer on a BBC Micro, it'd crash terribly if you deleted any of the fake patterns created by software bugs, losing of all your work! - and we thought we were lucky! But tell that to the kids today? - Will they believe you? No..."

[rfssongs]

I had a QX7 box no screen. Very much working in the dark - then an Amiga. Then an 8088.

We have gone a very long way.

Regarding inserting CC into the event list. This is really very easy.

Just view the event list

Go to the location

Hit the insert key

Change what was inserted to the type, location, and value you need.

Pedal (sustain) is CC 64, 0 is pedal off, 127 is pedal on.

 

 

[sjoens]

On 1/3/2022 at 6:23 AM, Jeremy Murray-Wakefield said:

- does anyone know if there is a setting in a file anywhere that would either force pedal-up on stop or cause an "all notes off" to be sent? (I've tried "MFX Sustain Fix" from TenCrazy but it has undesireable side-effects).

 

Not sure if this was mentioned or even applies here, but...

If PLAY is stopped between an ON and OFF controller then it will maintain the status of the last known controller.

Pitch Bend and other controllers behave the same way when stopping before a -0- controller.

BTW, as far as Sustain goes, 0-64 is OFF and 65-127 is ON, so you don't have to be spot on 0 or 127.

[user905133]

Not sure this fits your specific needs, but maybe: For improvised textural music, I generally had a knob on my controller set to CC64.  Real time layering  involved playing on any number of 16 MIDI channels (playing notes, tweaking CCs, etc.).  So, a basic strategy was turning the CC knob up (sustain on = 64 - 127) to lock in a sound or down (off = 0 - 63) on a per channel basis to trigger the sound's release cycle. 

At the end, instead of turning all layers [channels] off at once (such as by using a global [all channels] panic button), sustained channels were turned off one by one by using the CC64 knob and going through all 16 channels (or however many were used).

Lately, I haven't used this performance modality (since I started seriously exploring the use soft synths), so I am unsure if this would work with all or some current soft synths.  The hardware sound modules I used like this were pretty consistent in their use of CC64 (and many others CCs specified by the midi specs if implemented).

Again, just a thought [set up a CC64 knob/button on your controller] in case it helps.

 

[Blogospherianman]

1 hour ago, sjoens said:

BTW, as far as Sustain goes, 0-64 is OFF and 65-127 is ON, so you don't have to be spot on 0 or 127.

Unless the piano uses continuous CC for quarter/half/three quarter pedaling etc (everything in between) like Vienna Synchron Pianos and most Roland keyboards. 

[Jeremy Murray-Wakefield]

52 minutes ago, User 905133 said:

At the end, instead of turning all layers [channels] off at once (such as by using a global [all channels] panic button), sustained channels were turned off one by one by using the CC64 knob and going through all 16 channels (or however many were used).

Yeah, that's a bit much to do every time I press Stop - which may be several times a minute.

I'm (mentally) committed now to relying on "Reset All Controllers" and finding quick ways to remap bad NI Komplete presets as I come across them.

i.e. curing the real error ? 

[Markleford]

On 1/3/2022 at 10:23 AM, Jeremy Murray-Wakefield said:

(I've tried "MFX Sustain Fix" from TenCrazy but it has undesireable side-effects).

 

Tell me about said side-effects, and maybe I can fix them.

- m