Strange pedal behavior

[jkoseattle]

I just got a brand new digital piano (Casio AP-270). It's not the greatest on-board sound, but the action is terrific and it's mostly a MIDI controller anyway. It plugged right in a Sonar saw and used it without my having to do anything. Nice! 

However, the pedal markings look strange. With my M-Audio keyboard, I would get 0 and 255, and that's it, easy. With this new keyboard I'm also getting pedal events at like 127 or something right before and after the 255 chunks. Anyone know what this is about, if it's something other keyboards do? Is there a purpose to it? 

Speaking of that, I've always hated how CW/Sonar handles pedal events anyway, requiring me to drag precisely on the corners to move them around. Seems like it should be way simpler. But that's a long-standing gripe, I'm mostly concerned about these extra pedal events this new keyboard is sending.

[Amberwolf]

Are you talking about sustain pedal CC64 events?   Or something else?

I've only ever had keyboards that could output 0-127 for those, so I don't know what the 255 values would be for. 

 

 

 

[David Baay]

Like other MIDI controller types, sustain messages have a range of 0 (full up) to 127 (full down). Basic pedals just have an on/off switch that causese the keyboard to generate one message or the other when the switch opens or closes (there's no convention for which state generates 0 or 127; implementations from different manufactureres vary). A continuous pedal presents a variable resistance to the keyboard that allows it to generate intermediate values to produce partial damping in an instrument that's capable.

Continuous sustain messages can complicate the editing process, and in a lot of musical contexts the difference between continuous and on/off values isn't really noticable even in an instrument that supports it. But thinning continuous sustain messages to only 0 and 127 is a non-trivial task; (I might have written a CAL to do it at some point). The easier thing to do would be to configure the keyboard to produce only on-off values if possible or get a pedal that only switches.

Edited Monday at 01:39 PM by David Baay