A further update for anyone using this scheme. There are a couple of problems with this approach when using MIDI Patch Persist. After discussion and understanding the workings of PP, these are the issues, they may or may not be important in your setup. For patch persist to work it must have a MIDI input other than the Local GP Port as it’s input so this stops the stacking of MIDI input blocks using Merge and Local GP Port. The second problem is masked by the first. So if you use device input and merge in the sustain pedal from a different device the persist works on the notes held but not when held by the pedal (hands off). For me this was a problem that needed a workaround, I guess it will be for people that use a separate MIDI pedal board for their sustain…
The workaround is to put some the MIDI CC filtering and pedal merge into the global rackspace and loop round via MIDI IAC (Mac) or virtualMIDI (PC). Where “Lower Board Performance” and “Upper Board Performance” is a safe filtered MIDI stream and “Lower Board Perf Controls” is used to filter out the MIDI notes, aftertouch and channel pressure from the lower board while keeping the sustain. This gets the filtered and merged stream onto a single specific deice input.
This new MIDI device is now available to use on the MIDI IN blocks in any rackspace and carries the input correctly so that Patch Persist now works with a pedal from a separate MIDI source. What has been lost is the clarity of the connection source which I liked, now the source has to be identified in the MIDI Input block name. But by doing this and only using these new virtual devices your setup only requires just one sustain pedal, patch persist works and is is impossible to get to a gig and have rogue CC messages arriving at your plugins.
For convenience I also use rig manager to map the virtual devices to a sensible name. Where the “Performance” indicates to me this is an input stream with just realtime keyboard controls. Any other controls needed can be mapped via widgets.
Hopefully this will help someone on their way to fame and fortune!!