Topic: Distortion when played from a midi keyboard.

Sorry, best topic title I could come up with.
When I play a midi file the sound is "acceptable", given the laptop speakers.
When I play from my keyboard the sounds are recognizable, but very distorted, a "nasal" distortion.
It is actually WORSE than the windows direct sounds
I have tried various audio buffer sizes, but they seem to affect little more than latency.

From menu  File->Audio/Midi setup->MIDI window ; the received MIDI messages panel sometimes show some aftertouch messages. 
I am wondering if these are likely to trigger or re-trigger notes that I don't intend to play, some sort of perverse rapid repetition.
Is there a way to disable or ignore aftertouch within pianoteq ?

Re: Distortion when played from a midi keyboard.

Hi

I have been away for awhile from this forum, and from PT.
I have just been refamiliarizing myself with PT and noticed basically the same problem on my system.
It is the main reason I do not use PT, except to play a midi file now and then.

It would be interesting to hear from others who have experienced a similar problem.
Are there any PT/MIDI gurus out there who might have some insight and a possible solution?

Allan

Piano dilettante

Re: Distortion when played from a midi keyboard.

I should probably have mentioned that I am running Windows 7 on an I-7 laptop with 8 gig of memory.
From what I have read in other thread this should be an adequate hardware base, despite the fact that Windows is in no way a real time OS.

  I re-try with every update of pianoteq, but this problem causes me to quickly return to using it only for playing midi files.

Re: Distortion when played from a midi keyboard.

I browsed the forum for "distortion" and got a few hits that seem interesting.
This one;
http://www.forum-pianoteq.com/viewtopic.php?id=1188
is from 3 years or so ago, so is based on PTQ 3 (or 3.5) but it seems relevant.
I should AT LEAST twiddle with some off the twiddleable things and thangs therein mentioned and suggested

As a mere "user expectation" I still find it surprising and disappointing that I don't get exactly the same sound from my midi controller as I get from a midi file.
If I accompany a midi file that is playing and has good sound then my accompaniment should have the same sound (voice, or timbre).  Volume may be a different issue, I can play harder or softer, or adjust the velocity curve, but the basic TONE should be a LOT closer than it is, without all the distortion.

Re: Distortion when played from a midi keyboard.

Did Custral's post get deleted ?

Re: Distortion when played from a midi keyboard.

I deleted it. Wasn't best put. Here is again and if you don't want it I'll delete again.

tractor_music wrote:

As a mere "user expectation" I still find it surprising and disappointing that I don't get exactly the same sound from my midi controller as I get from a midi file.

Get Elmar GASANOV's MIDIs from DisKlavier Competition 2009 and hear them thru, watching the Pianoteq Velocity telltale meanwhile. He placed nowhere, but stands out from the rest for beauty of touch, and the telltale shows that's likely to be from an unusually wide spread of touches, and changes of spread, at any time. You'd think, on learning a piece his attention would first go to this point, so marked is the difference in his approach.

Why should one expect this instrument to sound all the same, in all circs and with all pairs of hands, when variation of touch is wholly what it's designed to produce? Unless the general approach IS standardised, of course; and that was what the judges were listening for, and best-exhibited wins.

Re: Distortion when played from a midi keyboard.

Thanks Custral.
I had neglected to say that I had isolated a few note fragment from a midi file and I get the distortion when I play those same notes at comparable velocities with similar damper pedal position.
Clearly we all have different touches, but when playing PTQ from my keyboard I can't get anywhere NEAR the clarity that any midi files play at.

There is almost certainly something wrong with my set-up, I will try to find time to tear it down and start over next week.
Maybe substitute some different cables, or at least swap them around to see if I can MOVE the problem

Thanks again.

Re: Distortion when played from a midi keyboard.

tractor_music wrote:

There is almost certainly something wrong with my set-up, I will try to find time to tear it down and start over next week.

Are you using Windows Audio, Direct Sound or ASIO? An audio interface? Rebuilding your system may help but if you give more details on your setup, maybe someone here can be of more help. But this is probably blatantly obvious...

Re: Distortion when played from a midi keyboard.

mabry wrote:
tractor_music wrote:

There is almost certainly something wrong with my set-up, I will try to find time to tear it down and start over next week.

Are you using Windows Audio, Direct Sound or ASIO? An audio interface? Rebuilding your system may help but if you give more details on your setup, maybe someone here can be of more help. But this is probably blatantly obvious...

Thanks for your input.
This is common to ASIO4ALL v2, Windows Audio and Direct Sound.
I have a Realtek HD Audio device built in.

I may be taking too simplistic a view of the paths.
I have been assuming that my keyboard connects in a very simple way to the same midi path in the same way as loaded midi files do.
At some point this MUST be true, I just need to know where the differences are so I can figure out where the corruption is getting in.

The frustration is that I can see the midi stream in the File->Audio/Midi setup->MIDI window and it looks perfectly valid, i.e. middle C comes in as middle C and the velocity is about right, if I hold it for long enough there MIGHT be some aftertouch messages, when I release it the note off message comes - but the SOUND is TERRIBLE.  Nowhere near what I get from midi files.

Something I don't know is the point at which that display window gets its data, i.e. whether it is "right off the cable" or after some software mixer/merger that is common to the played midi file midi stream.

BTW, the keyboard still plays FINE to my rack of hardware.

Re: Distortion when played from a midi keyboard.

The problem you describe simply cannot be caused by Pianoteq.  Pianoteq responds to midi events which are described by a few simple parameters like note value, length, velocity.   It will make the same sound whether that midi note comes from a file or a keyboard for the same set of note parameters.   Pianoteq records all the midi sent to it.  Why don't you record some midi from you keyboard and then play that file back in Piantoeq.   The audio would have to sound the same.   If the file you recorded sounds terrible, perhaps you could post it somewhere so others can test it and perhaps figure out what the problem is.  When you say the sound is terrible can you be more specific?   I'm pretty sure the midi display in Pianoteq is specific to Pianoteq and reflects the midi input it is receiving either from a file or from keyboard input.  The only explanation of your situation that I can think of is that your keyboard is sending out bad midi messages (like velocity is always 127 or something).

Re: Distortion when played from a midi keyboard.

Hey,

I played my first gig tonight with Pianoteq and I had some distortion at first, which puzzled me.  I did not experience this on my home stereo monitors or headphones.  I was going straight from my Macbook headphone output to a direct box, then to the restaurant PA which was mono mains and mono monitors.  When I set PianoTeq to mono as well, that actually seemed to fix a good part of it, which I did not expect, but that's what I observed.  I also had Pianoteq turned up too loud on it's volume control and I was pushing too much into the red.  Pulling back the volume and setting to mono totally fixed it and it was beautiful.  I'll probably be trying a USB interface with two stereo outs soon.

Hope you can sort it out.  Don't overlook the obvious as I did.

Donny

Last edited by doncolga (17-01-2014 06:40)

Re: Distortion when played from a midi keyboard.

I might have made a microscopic amount of progress

The File->Audio/Midi setup->MIDI window shows EVERY NOTE played from my keyboard as being received on channel 1 and on channel 2, also their note off messages. 
As to why I didn't notice this before...  maybe I just confirmed that SOMETHING was being received with a note number SOMEWHERE in the low 60s and a velocity around 50, so didn't examine the channel # - OTOH maybe it wasn't there before last night.

I shall track this and hopefully figure out how to set the board to send on only ONE channel.
This does not happen on files played to PTQ from my "background music juke box".
Since the juke box sounds good/fair one might reasonably conclude that the the issue is with the extra notes on channel 2.
 
BTW, that midi window shows what is received, selecting a different channel in the bottom left corner seems to only stop them going to the sound generator of PTQ.
My default on that was "ANY", I have set it to "1" in the hope of filtering out the channel 2 extra notes, but the distortion remains. 
All notes still show, but I get no sound if I select higher channels, e.g. 15.

I will update this thread if/when there is more progress.

Thanks to everyone who has responded.

Last edited by tractor_music (17-01-2014 14:23)

Re: Distortion when played from a midi keyboard.

tractor_music

If your keyboard allows it, you might try setting it to a lighter touch - works better for me.
Although I cannot see a direct relationship to what appears to be a MIDI problem, it may lend some insight.

Piano dilettante

Re: Distortion when played from a midi keyboard.

Quite by accident I stumbled on a fix last night.
I had been fumbling around with a MIDI/USB adapter that has a THRU  switch on it, I as playing a couple of notes, switching the THRU, playing them again to A/B compare.
I dropped the adapter and as I leaned down to pick it up I leaned on the notes a bit hard - WEIRD sounds came from PTQ, so I experimented farther and sure enough it was responding to aftertouch.

For the time being I have simply edited the aftertouch curve in the PTQ output window.
Where "curve" means a straight horizontal line at 0.

I will dig out the keyboard manual at some point and refresh my memory on how to turn off aftertouch messages, that is preferable to having PTQ receive and discard them with a filter.

So, I guess the takeaway message is; BEWARE AFTERTOUCH - it really CAN cause PTQ to produce WEIRD distorted sound.

Thanks again to everyone who responded.