[blog] Separate your sustain pedal from your controller

Link: Gig Performer | Separate your sustain pedal from your controller

Here’s a quick tip from David :slight_smile:

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I love this! It’s very helpful and way easier than trying to do this on my Kronos using Karma routing and midi filters.

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I’ve been doing this for years — sadly I thought it was such an obvious thing to do that I never thought about writing it up until someone asked how to do this last week.
Glad it works for you.

Is it the only exception where you don’t use host automation but MIDI ?

I figured that was the way when I was setting up sounds in GP but glad to get confirmation from @dhj as a best practice :rofl:

Pretty much — most plugins do not provide host automation support for Sustain so there’s little choice. The message itself, CC 64, is pretty ubiquitous and generally doesn’t need to be explicitly mapped by a plugin MIDI Learn function.

Also, you generally don’t need to scale the values. So it’s very convenient to just dedicate a block to to it.

Yes, but I meant is the CC#64 MIDI message the only one you use directly?

I tried and it worked well for one rackspace but now i just created a basic piano backspace and it’s just not working on Arturia pianov3

With apologies, then you didn’t do it right :grinning:

Check your wiring carefully and add a midi monitor after the incoming plugin from where the sustain messages are coming and check that the MIDI channel your sustain pedal is sending is the same as what the Arturia plugin expects.

One very common issue is that some plugins will respond to incoming MIDI messages regardless of the channel and some will only respond if the message is on a specific channel.

Looks like it was an Arturia piano issue - i had to change the channel in the piano program to then correct channel im using.

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I would encourage you to always use channel 1 on your controller and let GP do any routing or splitting

Normally I would but we are using Widi and my guitarist has an amp modeler that only operates out of midi channel 1 - and so I set my nord stage 3 for program changes to midi channel 2. I started fresh on my new set up with the controller (88 key) being midi 3 and my key tar as channel 4).

Once I do away with my nord (hopefully in the next year) - I can revisit the channels and see what we can do

If you have to use different input midi channels, you can still convert them all to channel 1 inside GP

Midi was never my strong suit - how do I do that? And won’t it impact using the Arturia? (Midi 3)

You can learn some tricks here: [blog] Dealing with back-lined or rented keyboards

Check out this section in the manual to get info on how to easily remap midi channels.

In this picture look at item 5. The top number is the incoming midi channel and you can change the bottom to whatever channel your plugin is expecting. I usually use this for Korg plugins that default to midi channel 1 and not OMNI.

You can also use Midi Channel Constrainer for a more visual and simpler way to change midi channels in the wiring view.

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