Handling overlapping midi notes in Cantabile

I have a question about how Cantabile handles overlapping midi notes. There are many times when playing piano music, that notes overlap. So in one stave you can have a chord in your right hand that is holding middle c , while the left hand has a middle c note that comes along. When actually playing, one has to lift the held note at just the right time to play the left hand note.
When Cantabile is playing back midi notation and an example like this comes along. is Cantabile suppose to just continue to hold the note or does it send a note off in order to play the overlapping note?
The reason I ask is that I have noticed that the overlapping note actually cancels the note completely, leaving a dead spot until that note is played again. I don’t recall this happening with my DAW Studio One, when it is playing similar situations.Is there a way to control how Cantabile deals with this?
Thank you for any help on this topic.
Terry Lafferty

Hi @terrylaff

Cantabile simply passes along any MIDI events to the plugins. For sequenced MIDI files - the same thing, what ever is in the MIDI file that’s what Cantabile will send.

The big question here is how the plugins handle this. Not all plugins behave the same.

The usual practice for overlapping notes is to play a second note, but the next note off for that note will end both previously played notes. ie: the second note effectively replaces the first note. The only work around I can think of for this would be to sequence each note on a different MIDI channel.

I don’t think MIDI defines any particular behaviour for this situation but certainly I’ve never heard of any plugins reference counting held notes to determine when the last instance is released. In fact, such behaviour would break with triple-sensor keyboards - you’d be left with stuck notes all over the place.

Brad

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Thank you very much for the quick replay Brad. I continue to explore it with my notation software (Notion 6) I will also shoot the question to Kontakt support and see what they have to say about it and let you know if I learn anything else.
Thanks again!
Terry

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