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Hi All,

I have a number of midi recordings that I rendered with a couple of different virtual pianos. However, the pedal effect in both is way too much causing a blurring sound.

I was wondering if it's possible to reduce the amount of pedal by using a midi editor... And if so which one? I have seen a couple of piano roll style midi editors but they didn't offer much in the way of pedal editing.

All suggestions are greatly welcomed.

Many thanks..

Every midi editor I know of comes in a sequencer and has TOTAL control over ALL the midi controllers! So I'm not sure which one you saw.

In any case try repear. It has an unlimited *ahem* trial last I checked (which was a long time ago... ok), and is very cheap but can be VERY good.

Then read the manual as well (sounds harsh or ridiculing you, but I don't mean that) and see, because really, all the piano rolls I know of can control the pedal (I know Sonar, Cubase, Logic and Reaper).

I agree with Nicholas. Perhaps you were not looking in the right part for the pedal controller section in the editor you have. Which editor were you were using? We may be able to direct you where to find it.

Thank you for your replies.

I know it sounds like pretty basic stuff. I am new to editing midi so am finding it a steep learning curve. I guess what I am trying to do is reduce the overall amount of sustain pedal during various sections of a piano piece I am editing. I have now found the sustain editing menu in Reaper but am still trying to find a way to select multiple events and reduce by a certain percentage.

Is that even possible? or do I have to go to each and every pedal event and manually reduce it?

That seems like fiddly work..

LOL, welcome to the exciting world of MIDI editing

Really, this is why it's always best to take more time practicing and get a good take rather than record with mistakes in there. It's doable to fix/alter things, but a pain.

I'm not too familiar with Reaper, but I do know it has a manual. You may want to actually read through it. I'm sure they have a way to select multiple events for mass editing. It may be something like holding down the Ctrl key (or on a Mac the Command key) while you select which events to edit. Or maybe you can click and drag to select several.

Then sometimes when you make your selection, you are able to right-click on them to bring up a menu, or even easier, you just drag the whole thing to the level you want it.

You'll have to get to know the program a bit to figure out which way it is.

Well... yes... For a 12 minute piano work that I was working on, in order to make it sound realistic, I spent about a week... so...

Just go ahead and start... fiddling!

Carl, you may be in for more adventure than you'd like to know about. You see, the midi data stream, which is what you're trying to edit is made up of the notes you played AND continuous controller (CC) data of which their can be 128 streams all mapped to different parameters like after touch, MIDI volume and other such things.

The good news is sustain pedal falls into the CC class. It's usually CC 64. All that means you're probably looking to edit the CC data stream. The less than good news is CC 64 is interpreted by most digital instruments to be either on or off with no gradation other than on or off. The less than good news that goes along with that is many MIDI sustain pedals only transmit sustain on or sustain off with no gradations in between.

So if your pedal data is indeed on CC 64 the reason your midi files have too much sustain is because of how individual synths (whatever the sound might be) respond to those sustain on and off messages.

So step 1 is ascertain whether or not the pedal info you want to edit is in the CC 64 stream. Step 2, if it is in that stream is to ascertain whether or not the data gas been recorded as 1s and 0s representing on/off or whether the data has been recorded as a complete range of values (from O through to 127).

On the other hand, if your original sustain pedal was sending out a range of continuous values between 0 and 127 then you have something to work with.

There are other scenarios that might apply but what I've described above is one the common ones. Can you give a little more info - which dig. Piano did you use originally and which controller did you use to play it?