Changing keyboard data from Volume to Soft Pedal

[Prasa_U.]

Keep in mind I have very little clue about this sort of technical stuff.

I have an M-Audio 88es keyboard. On the back, there is a slot for keyboard and a slot for volume. I have two sustain pedals. The second sustain pedal appears to work when I put it in the "volume' slot. When I don't press it, the sound is silent and when I do press it, I can hear the keyboard again. I have no idea if that's how the "volume slot" is supposed to work. But since it's apparently sending some data, is there any way to set it up in Cubase so that that I could use that to trigger the CC for soft pedal instead and get a sort of piano setup with two pedals going?

[Lunahorum]

I am wondering the same. I have an M-audio 88. Not sure if it's an ES or not though. Ok mine is not an ES. It is the full weighted keys. I was wondering about those semi-weighted keyboards and non-weighted keyboards. Are they good? I know most of the metal bands prefers the non-weighted keytars, but Jordan Rudess seems to like full weighted.

Anywho, I want a soft pedal too!.

[dannthr]

You can get pedals that measure gradients of pressure--that's the kind of pedal you'd want if you wanted to control volume with a pedal. (Not advised)

Volume, in my opinion, is a clumsy controller best set and rarely meddled with.

[tgfoo]

A couple things, the reason your sustain pedal acts like that when plugged into a slot for volume control is because a sustain pedal sends out only two values: 0 when it's not pressed and 127 when it is pressed. This is because sustain (midi cc 64) values between 0-63 is no sustain and between 64-127 is sustain. Hence when you plug the sustain pedal into volume, it sends a value of 0 for volume (min volume) until you depress the pedal and then it sends a value of 127 (max volume).

As for changing it into a soft pedal, I know in Logic you can put a midi transformer in that can change values (such as changing the value of pedal up from 0 to 127 and pedal down from 127 to say 64). Since I'm not familiar with it, I don't know how to do this in cubase or if it's even possible.

[dannthr]

You can get a damper pedal:

http://www.zzounds.com/item--ROLDP10

Which has multiple values (I think like... 5 or something) or you can get an expression pedal:

http://www.zzounds.com/item--ROLEV7

Which has like... 30 values.

Of course there are a lot of other kinds of pedals for keyboardists and you're usually going to find a better match with a pedal matching the brand because they usually tailor the response to their keyboard lines.

But I don't think they're the bees knees.

Give me a mod and pitch wheel and I'm infinitely happier.