Use of expression port on S-88 for soft pedal

Hello. I have the NI S-88 controller and the 2 pedal StudioLogic VFP2/10. The sustain pedal is plugged into the sustain port on the S-88. That is working fine. The soft pedal is connected to the expression port on the S-88, but that pedal is not working at all. I'm using a PianoTeq5 virtual piano, whose native player visually shows when it has received the midi command from the pedal. The sustain works as expected, but nothing from the soft pedal.

Is it possible to use the expression port on the S88 for soft pedal use (cc 67)? I tried to use the NI Controller Editor to assign CC67 to the expression port, but that made no difference.

Thank you in advance for any assistance or suggestions on how to resolve this problem.

 

Hello. Could you please confirm if you are using a stereo (continuous) or mono (switch) pedal in the expression port? If you are using a continuous pedal, you should have no problem with sending CC67 (you can verify this in an application such as MIDI Monitor by SNOIZE), but switch pedals cannot be used in the expression port. I hope this helps. Best, Adil

 

Hi Adil. Thank you for the quick response. Alas, it appears that this 2-pedal device from StudioLogic (owned by Fatar) only supports switched (on/off) mode for both soft and sustain pedals. That explains the problem.

Do you have any recommendations on 2-pedal devices (soft and sustain) that are continuous and are supported by the S-88? Or, perhaps there are 3-pedal devices that would also work, where only 2 of the pedal cables would be connected to the S-88?

Thanks again.

 

Hi Timothy. Unfortunately I cannot personally recommend any particular pedal, although my suggestion would be to go with a separate general purpose continuous/stereo expression pedal to be used alongside a sustain pedal. It is worth checking the specifications of double/triple pedals to see if they support both mono and continuous signals, but my expectation is that most double/triple pedals that contain 'sustain' in their name will be mono. Best, Adil

 

Thanks Adil. I did some research on this issue and ordered the Roland RPU-3 pedal. All three pedals in this unit are continuous. I will only connect the sustain and soft pedals to the S-88. Hopefully that will work. I could not find any 2-pedal units that are continuous, so maybe they don't exist.

 

Hello. I have a Native Instruments S-88 keyboard controller. Attached to the controller is a Roland RPU-3 pedal unit. The soft pedal is attached to the S-88 expression pedal port. The sustain pedal is attached to the S-88 sustain pedal port. All pedals on the RPU-3 unit are 'continuous' (sending a range of voltages) as opposed to switch-based (on/off).

I'm using PianoTeq-5 as a VST plug-in for use in my DAW (Cubase 9 Pro). Although PianoTeq does detect that the soft pedal is being used (midi controller code '67' is being received), the wrong midi data is being sent by the S-88. Specifically, the values 00 through 32 (decimal) are being sent from the expression port where the soft pedal is connected. PianoTeq, and other virtual instruments, expect a much wider range of data values (e.g., 0 - 127) to be sent for the soft pedal. The 00 - 32 range is too narrow to even be audible in terms of volume or timbre.

At first I thought this was a problem with the RPU-3 pedal from Roland. I contacted Roland Support about this issue, and here is the response I received (in quotes below):

"The RPU-3 (like other sustain pedals) does not send the values - it provides a voltage to your controller, which then sends out the specific values you are seeing. We tested this on our FA-06 keyboard and the output included values between 0-127 (the whole range of the controller). We also tried this with Pianoteq 5 on our test system and did not have any problems controlling the piano or activating the soft function.

If the S-88 is only outputting 0-32 (decimal), then we would first recommend checking to see if there is some sort of output range setting on the keyboard for this control. Some Roland controllers allow for this, so you may have to adjust this on the S-88 also."

So this appears to be a problem with the S-88. Can you please provide a response to this inquiry and the remarks from Roland above. I have been unable to use this soft pedal since I purchased it 2 weeks ago, which is most frustrating. My S-88 is still under warranty; it was purchased late in 2016.

Thank you in advance for your support.

 

Hello. Could you please check the following:
- Open Controller Editor and select your keyboard for editing (if you have not changed controller type, this will be selected by default).
- Select the left pedal (named CC 67 by default).
- Verify that the range values are 0-127.
A smaller range value will cap the values being sent from the keyboard to your MIDI target. Following this, please open Controller Editor Preferences, select the Komplete Kontrol tab and recalibrate your expression pedal. You will be prompted on how to do so.
Best,
Adil

 

When pedals are continuous, they are basically using potentiometers (variable resistors) to generate a sweep of voltages that is going to be interpreted by the MIDI controller's pedal inputs. In this case, it looks like the voltage RPU-3 sends to the MIDI controller is much lower than what S-88 expects, which is what gives you only a part of the range of values (and this happens because the variable resistors in RPU-3 have probably very high resistance, and possibly exponential taper instead of linear). Naturally, Roland tested on their own equipment (FA-06), which has CC pedal ports that of course expect the resistance that Roland's pedals put out.

What needs to be done is either:

1. Replacing the pots in the RPU-3, or
2. Scaling the output CC values from 0-32 to 0-127, which you can do with a MIDI processor plugin in a DAW. I am not sure if Controller Editor can do this type of scaling.


It would be wise of NI to update the S-series firmware to be able to support pedals with different potentiometers. (Or is the pedal recalibration that Adil is talking about already doing this?) @Adil @ NI: can you let us know which kind of potentiometers S-series keyboards expect? Is it 10 Kohm linear? I think Roland might be using exponential pots and higher resistance (perhaps?), which is the main cause of this issue.

 

@adil, thank you for your suggestion. The controller editor did report the correct range value for the soft pedal (0 - 127). I then performed recalibration of both my soft pedal (which is attached to the Expression port) and my sustain pedal (which is attached to the Sustain port). Once that was recalibration completed, the problem was solved! PianoTeq recognized both use of the soft pedal, and half-damper use of the sustain pedal. Problem solved!

Thank you very much for your assistance is resolving this problem. The RPU-3 pedal unit is now working beautifully with the S-88.

 

Great!

 

I am about to buy an S88MKII...and was just curious - does this conversation mean that there are just 2 out of 3 pedals able to work in this scenario, or is there also sostenudo for the middle pedal?