Kontakt pianos chopping off notes

My Kontakt pianos (Berlin/NewYork/Vienna) chop out notes on my piano piece where other piano software synths don't.

It sounds like there's not enough voices but I can see there are 256 - I have a recently purchased iMac with 4GBRAM and an i3 3.2Ghz processor and I'm running Logic9.

I've made a video showing the situation to make it clear (see below) - it shows my event list (so you can see there's nothing that should be chopping the notes off).

- I start by playing the first 2 bars on Logic's Yahama Studio Piano - works fine
- I then play the first 2 bars on Kontakt Berlin piano and the first notes are horrendously chopped

The video (below) shows a screenshot so you can see and listen to what's happening.
It happens every time I play this section and on all the Kontakt pianos I have - Berlin/NewYork/Vienna. It chops out other notes in the piece to a minimal extent - perhaps it's responding to pedal/sustain message wrongly/differently?

YouTube video showing situation:
http://youtu.be/jjaE6bdDLTA

 

No idea. You've certainly documented it very well. Have you tried moving everything to bar 2 (i.e. leave bar 1 blank) to see if there's something weird that Logic is sending as the sequence starts?

I don't see any pedal CC's in your event list -- should I see them?

I have seen Kontakt act this was with duplicate note events occasionally -- but don't see any duplicate note events in your event list.

Perhaps you could post the MIDI (or Logic) file for other users to try?

 

That's it, I hadn't tried that.
I tried moving all the regions a bit later and the chopping has gone.
It didn't seem to matter how much I moved it, as long as I did.

So in the meantime I'll just have to play the 1st bar at temp 999 to avoid waiting every time I start the piece.

I must have mistakenly scrolled the 1st event out in my video, as yes the sustain pedal is the 1st event - I've attached a new screenshot, albeit starting at bar 2 now.

A first guess might be that the sustain isn't playing, but the notes are lengthened as well, so there's no reason for the notes to cut off the way they did.

 

Interestingly, if I bounce the song in question starting from the new bar 2, I get the chopped notes again. So this almost rules out Logic (my DAW) from passing odd MIDI data and seems to suggest that there's something funky about the way Kontakt or just the pianos are interpreting certain data.

I'll come back and save a snippet of the song as a MIDI file and attach it here - just for the record.

 

In fact, I can see that I now have a healthy number of piano notes being chopped off in all my compositions not necessarily at the beginning. And there's no getting rid of them!

So I will post the midi data here tonight, but I suspect I'm going to have make a support request as well because the Kontakt pianos are all chopping notes off in the way described at least once for every song I have - all prominent enough to ruin the passage being played and indeed the entire composition.

 

Attached files to reproduce issue

For anyone who's interested, I've attached a .logic file containing a minimal 7 bars of piano to illustrate the problem.

I also included a .midi file - if using it you'll probably have to merge the 3 tracks created - 1 for each voice. But I'm not sure if this issue is specific to Logic/Kontakt so it may not be useful.

I've attached a screenshot of my particular instance of Berlin piano. That it uses 'omni' might matter, but probably not much else will make a difference here.

To reproduce the problem (and assuming Logic).
1. Open kontakt.piano.notes.chopped.logic - there is 1 track, with a piano playing 7 bars.
2. Ensure any of Berlin/New York/Vienna piano is set as the piano
3. Play the piece from the beginning
4. Observe that the first notes are all chopped/cut and also on the 1st beat of the 5th bar most notes (C,D,F#) are chopped/cut such that they don't play.
5. Choose any other piano sound you may have that isn't Kontakt and observe that no notes are chopped/cut

Actually, if you play the piece from any bar (not just the 1st), all the notes of that first beat will be chopped/cut - use the <> shortcut to swap between bars to test this.

The sound to expect when I say chopped, is that shown in this demonstration video - http://youtu.be/jjaE6bdDLTA

 

I just had a brainwave about this - since Kontakt treats "omni" a little strangely to my mind (it's not the default midi channel)

I think what's happening, if only part of the problem, is that the Pedal/Sustain midi messages are only transmitting on one channel(?)
I've edited the piano to be 4 voice polyphonic - so maybe kontakt is only processing the pedal/sustain messages for the 1 channel and not processing pedal sustain notes for the other 3 channels I have.

This would possibly explain why some notes are getting chopped off and not others.

It doesn't seem like this is a very sensible thing to do mind you - and indeed other piano sounds don't do it (ie they have no problem and don't chop off notes)

Do you think this could be right and would this be an awesome feature that I'm yet to fully appreciate?
(I can't test the theory right now)

 

Solved

I figured this out.
As explained in the image attached, the note being chopped off was being "stepped on" by the previous note - or overlapped.
This caused the second note to stop - I guess because it's getting a "note off" signal - even though that signal is actually from the previous note.

As mentioned before, Kontakt is the only piano that suffered the chopped notes, so I gather everyone else doesn't interpret overlapped notes in this way - it is, to my mind, the worst guess, practically guaranteed to ruin your music... but easily fixed

 

Interesting.

I'm curious to know how you achieved such a bizarre and non-standard MIDI sequence. A note-on should be followed by a note-off before the same note can be repeated. I recently learned (on this forum as a matter of fact) that the modern "tri-sensor" piano will allow you to repeat the same note without a note-off if you only half-release the key, but it compensates by sending equivalent multiple notes-off when the key is fully released. (The purpose of this eludes me completely.)

I'm sure my CLP-380 could not generate the MIDI sequence you describe, but if it received it it would not switch off the note until it had received as many notes-off as notes-on. Kontakt of course doesn't behave like this: a note-off is a note-off, whatever was in the mind of whoever sent it.

I am not familiar with any of the common DAWs because I use my own sequencing software. One of the many advantages of this is that I know exactly what is going on. The print-out from your sequencer's track data suggests that notes-off are not included in the MIDI event list, but instead the program calculates and displays the length of each note. This conveniently shortens the list but deprives you of information which might be important (in this case would have rapidly solved your problem). (Does your sequencer list true notes-off (i.e. $8c xx xx) which actually contain velocity data?)

But I'd love to know where your sequence came from. Did you edit note lengths in this passage, and does your sequencer allow you to do this so that notes can "overlap" in the way you describe? If so I would consider this a shortcoming in your sequencer.

Did the music come from several sources, which were then merged on to the same channel? If so, hard to prevent problems of this kind arising.

For Kontakt to behave like a tri-sensor piano it would have to keep a continuous record of how many notes-on vs notes-off it has received for every note number on every channel, and only implement a note-off if they balanced. Hard to see any useful application for this, apart from more friendly interpretation of off-beat sequences. To my mind Kontakt (not to mention the developers!) has better things to do. If the lack of this facility creates a real problem, it could be quite easily achieved by using an array in a simple script.

 

Yes a fair question.
I'm not sure what merging I might have done when recording it, but the music in question was originally played and edited in the NotatorLogic sequencer on Atari in the early 1990's ;-)
The sequencer I'm using now (Logic9) can still read the .SON file format from it's ancient forebearing software from nearly 20 years ago - which was extremely useful to me, else the stuff I'm working on would have been lost.

Logic9 actually has a specific function to remove repeated overlapping notes of the same note, so this is pretty easy to fix - once you know it's there.

So, yes I agree, although I think the idea of people saying they "have better things to do" always comes off sounding sort of rude (not you, just the sentiment) but yes, I wouldn't go nuts expecting a fix for this. It's solvable enough - even if it took me a while.

Maybe playing this music properly is akin to browsers on the internet interpreting crappy HTML into something that worked for years, eventually allowing worse and more confusing code to creep into the universe.

 

Meant it quite literally - no intention to be rude. Kontakt has an awful lot to do and I wouldn't want to risk slowing it up unnecessarily!

Interesting history. (My sequencer was written for the Atari ST and runs today on a splendid emulator called Steem which you may have heard of.)