Just on a side (musical) note. With Piano, the "Sustain" pedal
undamps all the strings so you do get sympathetic resonances AND the
notes die away slowly with the pedal held. So it seems the Yamaha is
modelling this. But then, on a piano, the notes die away even if you
hold the keys; one of the reasons it is classified as a percussion
instrument, not a stringed instrument. The middle pedal of a Grand is
the "Sostenuto" pedal which lifts the dampers of whichever notes you
are holding at the time, leaving you free to play other notes while
these are held. But still the notes will die away.
Way back when the early synths were developed, the envelope of a
sound was divided into 4 segments referred to as Attack, Decay (of
the attack, to the) Sustain (level that the note will be maintained
at until let go into the) Release. This was intended to be able to
simulate the starting transient of an instrument. The standards
today still reflect that thinking.
So the "Envelope Sustain" provided by a sustain pedal or code in MIDI
is NOT sustain in the Piano sense but is more like sustain in an
Organ sense. Interestingly, some of the larger Theatre Pipe Organs
had a "sostenuto" switch which held on the pipes that were sounding
when the switch was activated. In this case, the pipes do keep
sounding until you release the switch - more like MIDI.
So take your pick - sustain or sostenuto! (With apologies to those
who already know this stuff)
Regards
Graham
On 25/10/2011, at 6:12 PM, Matt Giuca wrote:
But to simulate the other piano strings resonating in sympathy when
the sustain pedal is pressed then you want to have some chorus/echo
effect at the same time as the sustain pedal is pressed.
If the piece has been recorded from live keyboard playing then
removing the sustain pedal will totally change the way the piece
sounds.
I don't know exactly what effect you are talking about, but with my
Yamaha, the sustain pedal does cause the note to fade out once you
release the key. If you don't remove the "sustain" command from the
MIDI file, then the "extended decay" command will have zero effect,
because there will be no note-off events to decay.
So you would either be sending the sustain command, or this
(possibly fictitious) "extended decay" command, but not both.
Andrew, I'm wondering if you can clarify some of those terms for
me, since I'm pretty unfamiliar with modulation. You said "You
would do it by hooking a modulator to some CC input and using it to
extend the volume decay phase - you can do that in the soundfont or
the synth."
Let's assume that I don't particularly care how to get this input
in there (via a pedal, using the mouse to draw it, inserting it
into a MIDI file with a hex editor) -- I want to see if it can be
done at all and then I'll figure out a way to hook it up to my
physical pedal. When you say "hooking up a modulator to some CC
input", do you just mean there would be some controller change
event that I can produce to make the decay longer? I have a list of
CC messages here:
http://www.srm.com/qtma/davidsmidispec.html
and I can't see anything that might do that.
Or perhaps you mean there's no built-in way to do that (in the MIDI
spec), but that I could find an unused controller and edit the
FluidSynth code to make it extend the decay?
Thanks,
Matt
_______________________________________________
fluid-dev mailing list
fluid-dev@nongnu.org
https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-dev
_______________________________________________
fluid-dev mailing list
fluid-dev@nongnu.org
https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-dev
