Re: [fluid-dev] MIDI piano + sustain pedal realism

[Aere Greenway]

On 08/03/2018 07:01 PM, S. wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm new to the world of MIDI, although I've used Linux for a really 
> long time. Anything that I do with a computer I pretty much require 
> that it works with Linux or else I'm not interested. I've played piano 
> most of my life and I've recently been looking into a fairly realistic 
> and inexpensive way to go digital. So I recently bought a slightly 
> used M-AUDIO 88es at a great price, and I connected it to an old 
> laptop running openSUSE Leap 15.0 . Basically, I was able to plugin in 
> the controller/keyboard and connect it to a software synthesizer via 
> qjackctl, and I am able to play music. So that's the important part. 
> :-) Now there are just a few oddities and bugs I'm running into, 
> mostly relating to the naturalness of the sustain pedal behavior with 
> anything that uses FluidSynth (qsynth or SF2 Player in LMMS):
>
> 1. The sustain pedal works, but not like a real piano. After hitting 
> some keys, releasing the keys, and then immediately depressing the 
> sustain pedal while there is still residual resonant sound, it does 
> not sustain the resonant sound. At least, it normally doesn't-- but 
> for a short period I was constantly switching back and forth between 
> qsampler and qsynth and restarting Jack, and at some point the sustain 
> pedal starting acting like a real piano under qsynth, sustaining the 
> resonant sound after releasing keys. ?!?!?! But I can't repeat it now.
>
> 2. I really like the Yamaha Salamander soundfont from SoundFonts4U, 
> but it appears that FluidSynth doesn't reproduce the sustain pedal 
> release noises that some of the instruments have there, which I would 
> really like to have. Is this an SF2 format limitation or a FluidSynth 
> limitation?
>
> Any other options or tips or workarounds? Thanks in advance!
>
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From using different sustain pedals, I have gotten the impression that 
some of them use different polarities for pedal-down, versus pedal-up.  
I think it assumes that whatever the state of the sustain-pedal is when 
the MIDI software initializes, is 'pedal-released'.

I also saw once, a friend of mine was sure the sustain pedal wasn't 
working, when what actually happened, is he (absent-mindedly) had his 
foot on the pedal when he started up his MIDI software (he was using 
Rosegarden), in response to which, the pedal from that point forward, 
acted the opposite way he expected it to (pedal-down = pedal-release, 
and pedal-up = pedal-engage).

Hopefully, something like the above is not confusing the issue for you.

By the way, I use an M-Audio KeyStation-88, and it has worked very well 
for me.  I have not only a sustain-pedal on it, but also a volume-pedal 
(which has its own set of pit-falls you have to be careful about).

I have also encountered a sustain-pedal for a Yamaha S90-es, that if you 
released the sustain-pedal half-way, it was supposed to have a different 
effect on that synthesizer, though I never observed it to work as the 
manual claimed.

--
Sincerely,
Aere