Midi cuts of my sounds!

[jakang]

I´ve just added a Roland A49 midi keyboard to m liverigg. My Roland is sending midi through midi channel 6, and i´ve set up different sounds in a combi to be played by the A49.
My problem is that since i´ve hooked up the Roland to my M50 my combis sometimes gets cut off when i play. For ex.. if i´m holding a chord with the sustain pedal, the sound can stop even if i don´t release the sustain.
As soon as i unplugg the midi cable in my M50 this problem stops.
There seems to be something with the A49 that my Korg doesn´t like.

This problem occur even if i play a combi that isn´t sending anything on the A49´s midi channel, a sound that doesn´t involve the midikeyboard at all.

My roland is brand new and installed prperly.

Any toughts?

[billbaker]

It sounds like you're running into polyphony issues -- there are not unlimited notes available to you.

A good way to think of it is you have one piece of music being played by two musicians at a piano, but they have to share the keyboard. As long as they have room for each other they're happy; but as soon as someone plays a big 5 octave arpeggio with the sustain pedal down he has to knock the other guy off the bench.

M50 (per sound on sound article) has 80 notes polyphony -- but halve that for 2 osc sounds (40) and halve that for layered combinations (20 notes @ just 2 layers) then subtract ~four of those for a sustained notes on your roland.

That leaves just 16 notes.

The protocol for note stealing is for first in first out once the limit is reached for polyphony, so depending on how you play and the combi you've set up and whether both your korg and roland are sustaining notes you will (are!) hitting the limits of polyphony for the M50.

WHAT CAN YOU DO....

Add an engine: get a rack synth or a soft synth that you can run on your computer. Not a perfect answer, but it would end the note stealing issue.

Subtract osc: In combinations you can thin the number of osc's used per program down to just osc-1 or -2 which may be enough to keep the character of the sound and give you back some polyphony.

Use GM voices: Where it is practical, use GM voices since they're usually set up as single OSC voices anyway (see: subtract osc).

Rethink and thin out your Combi: do you need 3 synths layered where 2 would work? does the bass note need to be poly vs mono? is there an alternative sound, i.e., "piano&strings" rather than one track of piano and another of strings?


Hope this helps.


BB

[StephenKay]

It's also possible that the Roland is sending an "all notes off" message (Controller 123 I think) for some reason. If it's happening at times when you're not even playing a lot of notes on the Roland, you might check into this....