If I start playback of a MIDI piano track in the middle of a measure (like the screenshot below) it plays as if the damper pedal isn’t on. The notes sound staccato until the next pedal movement.
I wish Ardour played back the pedal correctly when starting at any point in the measure.
I experienced this a long time ago. I remember that Paul answered that it is the hell of a problem to reconstruct the complete state of CCs at a particular point in time. So the play is started without any reconstruction, hence, no sustain.
Actually Ardour does play back the pedal “correctly” at least as the MIDI standard would expect. That is not the same as playing things back as expected. In theory, once the CC for pedal is sent as on, the synth should keep that state but if the last state from somewhere else in the time line is off then that is the state that will be kept. Also some synths may reset the pedal with an “all notes off” message. This is the same problem that occurs if a note is being used as a drone for several bars and one starts in the middle of that. In fact that may be harder because a restart of the drone at the start point may sound noticeably different than the sound of the tail of the note. I understand that for a piano player, the pedal CC is the most important CC to a point where it should almost be a part of the note info but the designers of the MIDI standard did not think of that as they were thinking (at the time) mostly about playing more than one synth using one keyboard rather than sequencing.
It might be interesting to be able to label a midi track as a piano track (similar to drum mode) and in cases where the pedal is on, record note starts only… this would be non-reversible and the note length would be lost. Because the note length would be lost, moving a pedal event after the fact would cause problems or just not work.
Perhaps in this case, having the ability to edit the MIDI after the fact is more important than the sound when playing parts of the track. If a portion of the track (a verse or chorus) is to worked on separately, it is perhaps worth while adding a CC pedal on message at the start of that portion. This is something a piano player could train themselves to do while playing.
This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
