Midi File - disengage from Sustain Pedal

Here is my situation. My drummer is sometimes out and I have written drum tracks for those occasions. I export the track as an MP3 file and play it with Media Player 1. All my percussion goes into this track because there will never need to be a key change. No problem.

For the first time, I’m attempting to add a “accent” track which runs on Media Player 2. I created this in MIDI so that I could use sounds through Cantabile plugins. I expect to use Cantabile to change keys from time to time for this track.

I was surprised to notice that the MIDI file was affected by my sustain pedal. It makes sense since I am feeding it through my plugin. Is there a way that I can circumvent this and allow it to play without being affected by the sustain pedal? This is a horns track. Perhaps the best answer is to produce an MP3 and then use Cantabile to transpose?

Related to this is that when I start the Media players (Player 1 starts Player 2 also) the volume of the horns plugins goes up drastically on my keyboard. My Main Keyboard is feeding my piano, then the two horns plugins that I’m using. Media Player 2 is feeding the horns, too. When I’m not playing the Media Players, the sound can be adjusted as usual and all is well. Once the Media Players start the horns plugins go up at least 10db. I’ve turned the Media Player 2 down but that doesn’t seem to help. Something about these things running in conjunction seems to be doing it.

Main Keyboard --> Concert Piano --> Main Speaker Out, Right Channel.
Main Keyboard --> & Horns 1 & Horns 2 --> Main Speaker Out, Right Channel.
All plugins here are in Linked Racks.

Not a direct answer to your question, but I split the data from all my incoming keyboards via a rack that divides off notes, pedals, controllers, modulation, pitchbend, aftertouch, etc. Then I can direct any of these to precisely where I want them.

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That’s very interesting and may be similar to what I’m doing with my microphone. I run it through a vocal correction rack then output it to other effects which I control individually.

For the problem above, making an MP3 seems to be the easiest solution. I don’t have the volume increase and I don’t have the sustain pedal issue. I had simply thought that MIDI transposing might give me a better sound than transposing an audio file.

Can you explain your setup in a bit more detail?

To be sure: your MIDI file isn’t usually affected by your sustain pedal, but probably your sustain pedal is routed from your main keyboard to the same VST instrument that your MIDI file is routed to, which means that the sustain commands you send from your main keyboard affect the horns being played by the MIDI track.

I assume you still want to keep your route from the main keyboard to your horns for the occasional “manual” horn part - correct? Otherwise, you could just kill the route from the keyboard to the horns.

But it is easy to remove the sustain pedal from the route to the horns - simply insert a MIDI filter “Suppress Events” in the route from Main Keyboard to the horns and filter out CC 64 (sustain). Done!

Regarding the volume of the horns: I assume that your MIDI file is sending CC7 (volume) or CC11 (expression) commands to your horns plugin. Same solution: filter out CC7 and CC11 on the route from your MIDI player to the horns plugin - should do the trick!

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Torsten

(Side point - no need to use MP3s. These days memory is cheap, so no need to ruin your audio for the sake of a bit of space-saving).

(@The_Elf: Agreed. WAV files are “the way”.)

Thank you all. Brad had me do the MIDI filtering. My MIDI file is played through a Media Player synced to a master Media Player. By placing the filter on the route from the Media Player I was unable to solve the problem. By placing the filter on the plugin that has solved the problem.