Half-damper using Electro 4 to control VST?

[Rejiggered]

Hi all,

I know the Electro doesn't support half damper sustain, but I'm wondering if it'll pass through the half-damper CC correctly when using it solely as a MIDI controller for an external VST piano that does support half-damper (using a half-damper pedal of course, like the Yamaha FC-3).

I'm guessing I'd need to plug the half-damper pedal into control pedal port (since the other ports are on/off), and assign the half-damper functionality to the appropriate CC.

Make sense? Sound possible?

Thanks!

[pablomastodon]

Hi Rejiggered,

Based on this inquiry alone, your screen name was well-chosen.

These pedals don't transmit midi cc -- they transmit basic data to the keyboard's brains which in turn translate that data, in tis instance to midi cc. Since the NE4 doesn't support half-damper sustain, it won't know how to perform that translation.

Your 2nd paragraph raises an interesting idea for possible workaround. Assuming that your VST (or some intermediate software on the computer) can map the cc data generated by the Nord from control pedal movements onto the cc# needed by the VST for this function, then yes, that should work for you.

However, it is wrong to assume that connecting any half-damper sustain pedal to the Nord's control pedal circuit will produce the desired results. The Nord expects certain pedal behavior, which can be selected from a small menu of different pedals, but it is HIGHLY unlikely that your Yamaha FC-3 will accurately reproduce the behavior of any of these pedals. It may be worth a try and the results may surprise us all, but if that doesn't work (and I suspect that this will be the case), you can still complete your clever workaround scheme by using any of the control pedals recommended by Nord.

Bless,

Pablo

[Rejiggered]

Thanks Pablo! Great answer. That makes sense. Yes, the VST can map the half-pedal function to any CC. I figured it'd be one of those "try it and see if it works" scenarios. I guess it's worth a shot as long as I can return the FC-3 if it doesn't work out. I'll report back on my experiment.

Thanks!

[anotherscott]

You can add continuous pedaling for your VST by using a MIDI Solutions Pedal Controller.

[Rejiggered]

Thought I'd post an update in case anyone might try this. The workaround worked! The Yamaha FC-3 pedal didn't work as expected. It was reversed, ie. un-depressed caused sustain and vice versa. The various settings in the Nord menu for control pedal didn't change anything. But switching to a Roland DP-10 worked perfectly. I'm assuming it's a polarity thing. One small issue I ran into was also having to turn off CC #11 volume expression, so that the volume wasn't effected. After those two changes, I'm now getting half-damper support in my VST controlled via the Electro. Nice.

Steve