This article deals with a specific sustain issue that technical support has encountered more than a few times. It is a good place to start when troubleshooting sustain issues.
Issue:
If your sustain pedal isn't working correctly in Studio One, and if the resulting recording of sustain pedal information looks like the image below, the pedal information is going back to zero immediately even though you didn't released the pedal. This, of course, would not produce the desired musical result:
This could be caused by your keyboard or External Device sending multiple MIDI channels at the same time. When that happens, your keyboard sends sustain information on multiple channels like1,2, & 3, all of that gets merged at the Studio One track input. This causes the unwanted result.
To check for that cause:
- Open the MIDI monitor and clear all data from it.
- Set the filters as below to only see incoming controller data.
After doing that, press and release the sustain pedal once and then look at the resulting data in the monitor. If there are multiple messages on different MIDI channels, that's the cause of the issue.
To resolve it, go into your External Keyboard Device setup and uncheck every MIDI channel except channel 1 as shown below. It should behave as expected after that.
If you're using a custom External Keyboard Device that doesn't have those settings for MIDI channels, you won't be able to do the channel filtering shown above. In that case, you have two options....
- Try to find the setting in your keyboard that will stop it from sending sustain data on multiple channels at the same time. Or...
- Create a generic Keyboard Device like in the image above and only turn on channel 1 to filter out the other information.
Also, in your New Keyboard entry, make sure none of the MIDI Filters are checked. Checking these will block sustain messages from your sustain pedal.
****Leave unchecked as shown below.