Hanging notes on Gig Performer, please help

Hold on, Now I apparently get no hanging notes on standalone KONTAKT - Jazz Organ

Let me try on GP.

Checked on GP.

Less hanging notes, but, occasionally some. When it happens, the same f8 message keeps appearing in Midiview non stop.

Is this a clock message from other midi machine?

:frowning:

Where the f8 message comes from I cannot say.

How does SY-1000 decide to send Note Off Messages?
Maybe it depends on some audio levels coming in into the unit?
What does the documentation of SY-1000 say about that?

Maybe this would be a better solution in your use case?

MIDI Guitar 2 and Gig Performer

Thank you pianopaul

Seems I found the solution, let me check it.

I turned clock messages of from all midi units (SY1000, HXSTOMP and GUITAR SYNTH)

Now, I don t appreciate hanging notes.

I think clock messages affected somehow and produced hanging notes.

Please, let me check, but, we might have found the solution.

Thank you very very much.

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Is this possible?

External midi clock affecting GP and producing hanging notes?

What was I doing bad? What is the best to have a midi clock for all midi devices ?

I can confirm that we solved the problem.

Thank you vey much. I could not see the light.

Back to GP again. :slight_smile:

You don’t need MIDI clock at all unless you’re trying to synchronize the tempo of multiple devices. And in that case, you should only ever have ONE device sending out MIDI clock

Unlikely – if that was an issue we would have heard about this from many customers over the years.

MIDI click messages are sent 24 times per quarter note and use it to sync our BPM.

I don’t KNOW this but I suspect the issue is more likely related to your driver. Have you tried using an ASIO driver, e.g., https://www.asio4all.org/

Thanx.

I used only one device, the first in the midi chain (Roland GR55), to send midi clock to the rest. The driver used to connect HX Stomp to laptop is AsioHXStomp.

The thing is that when I turned the MIDI CLOCK SEND to off in Roland GR55, hanging notes vanished. I saw it with Midiview, that was a good advice that lead me to solve it.

Thanks to this forum, I found mind piece again…:blush:

The only thing now is, how to set external midi clock in order not to affect GP.

Any advice ?

OK – so let me make sure I understand — before you turned off the MIDI CLOCK, you were seeing those hanging notes, (i.e, missing Note Off messages) with Midiview? Is that correct?

Yes, exactly.

In that case, whatever is going on, the problem has nothing to do with Gig Performer. I still suspect the driver.

This is why it was so important to do the other tests….we were able to eliminate GP as the problem.

I dont know. Maybe you are right, but what could I do ? The driver comes with HX Stomp.

Now I cannot sync GP with an external midi clock.

Any suggestion ? Thank you again.

The point is, the MIDI viewer proves that events are not arriving. Since they’re supposedly being sent from your HX stomp, you should reach out to them with the evidence you have now collected.

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Well, HXStomp only passes midi thru messages coming from Roland SY1000 synth.

GP is a very good program. My midi sequence is

Roland Gr55–Roland SY1000–HXStomp–GP

When I turn off midi clock send in GR55, I get no hanging notes.

Now I will have to set bpm individually.

:slight_smile:

Exactly — and so that means that either the Roland is not producing the Note Offs or the HXStomp is losing them sometimes – drivers are software - they can have bugs. There’s no magic here – we have eliminated Gig Performer as the cause because the standalone MIDI Viewer shows the same problem. So the problem is clearly related to something else in your environment.

It would behoove you to figure out what’s going on here – the last thing you want is for this to fail unexpectedly and understanding what’s wrong is the first step towards preventing this.

So as I said earlier, you should reach out to whoever makes that HX stomp, or perhaps try using a different interface to see if that makes a difference.

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If you have cascaded MIDI connections and one of your MIDI device don’t handle properly the MIDI messages, you can possibly loose messages. Is there a way to simplify your connections and increase the complexity step by step in order to figure out what causes the loss of MIDI messages. You now have MIDI monitoring tools. If you cannot make sure what happens, you will still have a sword of Damocles on your head.

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Thanx to both. I will let you know when I find something relevant. :+1:

Very long thread, so maybe I missed something, but why the cascading midi?

The SY-1000 and Gr55 both carry MIDI on their USB out ports. It’s not clear to me why you want a midi cable at all anywhere in your system. It only invites the kind of problems you are having. Why not connect all three to your PC by USB?

Here’s a long description of why:
A set of MIDI devices in series is nothing like a set of audio devices in series. With audio the device just adds its waveform onto the incoming waveform. Whether it’s processing analog or digital, it’s a trivial operation.

Not so with MIDI. It is a protocol, and you can’t just simply slap one stream over another and expect it to work. A typical MIDI message is a sequence of three bytes. If a device is trying to merge its own data stream with another device’s data stream it has to track the messages and know when the other device is done before inserting any messages of its own. If it’s sending its own data it has to buffer the incoming data, keep track of it, then send it out when it’s done with its own.

Adding to the complexity, MIDI has a thing called “running status”, where the initial bytes of a message are not repeated if they are the same as the prior message. When devices send a series of Note On messages, for example, they may send the first byte once (the Note On) and then the second two bytes for each additional note (note number, note velocity) without repeating the initial Note On byte.

When chaining devices, the second device may (correctly) see a break in the sequence, then insert its own message. When the next note message comes from the first device using running status the second device has to remember “I just interrupted the running status, so I have to add a Note On byte to the data stream or the next device won’t understand”.

Now add to that the fact that there are two different ways to send a Note Off message. You can send it with hex code 0x80 (a real “note off”) or you can send it as a Note On (0x90) with a velocity of zero. There have been longstanding issues with MIDI devices not correctly tracking, processing, or passing these “note off as a note on” messages. The primary reason for creating this second flavor of “note off” message was to not have to interrupt the running status. Unfortunately, many devices over the years haven’t handled these “running status note off” messages correctly.

For an even moderately decent programmer none of this is difficult to handle. Except to do it correctly the programmer needs to understand the MIDI protocol, and account for the fact that this stuff is often processed alongside the real time audio processing in devices like this. So sometimes you finish your calculations and add something to the buffer after the buffer has already been processed. So you calculated it all correctly, but it doesn’t go out and it’s hard to figure out why. (Been there, done that.)

So really short point: don’t do serial MIDI unless you have to. These kinds of devices really aren’t designed for it. In your case I’d connect all three of your devices to your PC by USB and take your MIDI from that.

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Very interesting response, Vindes. Thank you very much.

Well, I am no midi expert but, with time, I have built a complex guitar rig in my humble home studio that includes many midi devices, old and new. Some have usb, some don t.

Now under pandemy, (like many of us), I suffered gas and also found a challenge to connect all unused midi and pedals in a rig, controlled by a Morningstar pedal controller.

My laptop was my final piece, as I wanted to use softsynths such as TyrrellN6, GuitarRig or Kontakt. These days I am finishing the set up and assigning controls.

The (personal) architecture of my rig includes, among others, my Gr55, my old Gr30, my new SY1000, HXStomp, my old VG99, midi modules like Sonic Cell, Roland JD08, Adrenalinn III, Enzo Meris, Ibanez Tubescreamer and others connected to my PA or to my Mesa Boogie amp.

At this moment, all main problems seem solved. The only one left, to say, was this conflict with midi clock sending through GR55, which produces hanging notes after some guitar playing.

Thank you again.

I remember some years ago I had a midi to usb interface cable that also couldn’t cope with midi-clock messages, sent by a Roland piano. Same results: Note-off messages were dropped. In the end, I replaced the cable with another one from another brand. Now I live happily ever after :grinning: