MIDI Recording: Release of Sustain Pedal kills the key sound

Question

TLDR: When recording my piano over MIDI, any time I release the sustain pedal, the played keys get killed off immediately, which doesn't happen on my Clavinova. What's the cause?

I recently built a setup to finally record all my songs which I did on my Clavinova CVP-105 on Floppy Disk throughout the last 15 years. I'm afraid the piano might die one day or the floppy disks might not be readable anymore so I want to save them somehoe for the future.

My setup: Yamaha Clavinova CVP-105 Alesis IO2 Surface Book 2 Reaper Piano One VST

My problem is: When I record and listen to the recorded songs on Reaper I noticed something I never heard before. Everything sounds more choppy and the reason is the sustain pedal. When I'm holding down keys and relaese the sustain the pedal, the Clavinova still holds the key, you can still hear it fading out. But on the MIDI it someohow kills the currently played keys making it sound choppy. I can see in the MIDI sheet that the key is being kept down, so release point is the same as on my clavinova but if I release the pedal in the middle, the key is also just played until that point.

I am using the sustain quite a lot since the Clavinova is not mudding everything together even if I hold the sustain for longer, meaning it has quite a short sustain per key which sounds super nice on it, but I can't record like this on MIDI since the VST I'm using (Piano One) will hold the keys much longer and everything builds up to a blur.

So what is causing this? Is it that particular Piano VST plugin I'm using? Will it be better on another one? I'm thinking about buying the Walker 1955 Concert D plugin but if the problem is the same there I might not spend 100 bucks on it.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Bit too much for a comment, but not really an answer as yet…

Some things to check - the Clavinova very likely is capable of using & sending the entire scale of CC64 [pedal].
The sequencer [or the VSTi] might only be using switch values of 0 & 127, or the worst, it toggles at values 63/64, making your pedal data well out from where you thought you played it.

Check also that the sequencer is not sending any 'all notes off' information & if it has a switchable pref, try with & without Running Status & see if is behaves differently.

[I can't help on specifics of Reaper, never used it.]

You should also test the files played back on the Clavinova as well as a couple of VSTis. There's also a chance the polyphony is lower on the VSTi, causing note-stealing.

Alternatively, get a floppy drive & import the files directly.
Worst case scenario, post one of the midi files [with a clear indication of one problem timestamp] & someone could have a look at the data...

Answer 2

You could isolate whether the cause is the VSTi by playing the MIDI through one of the different free VSTi's included in Reaper.

If you're seeing the notes stay active on the MIDI data then you can rule out the keyboard/MIDI-in, and I don't see any Reaper MIDI settings that relate to this behavior so I'd lean towards it being some setting or limitation on the VSTi.