Sustain pedal

Organs don't have sustain pedals. Instead they have a whole pedalboard, some expression/crescendo pedals (shoes), and assorted preset buttons (toe studs) for your feet to deal with. They also have stops to extend their range beyond the 88 keys on a piano. Using both hands and feet make it possible to play the full range of the instrument without needing a sustain pedal to allow your hands to jump around (trying to get all of the notes).

The beauty (and curse) of organs is that a note doesn't decay while it is being held. It continues sounding (at full volume) until it is released. A sustain pedal on an organ (functional similar to a piano's) would continue to add any newly played notes to the cacophony until the pedal is released. Any repeated notes (in the melody or harmonies) wouldn't sound (they would already be sounding). For example, a trill on the piano still sounds like a trill even with the sustain pedal applied. On an organ it would sound like a second chord that wasn't played with the notes together.

My suggestion is for you to try out some manuals-only organ music. It's not going to be as flashy as the music you're probably used to playing on the piano, but playing independent melody and counter-melody lines and having the chord progression morph along without any breaks or gaps sounds so cool. Generally, the flashier organ music requires both feet on the pedalboard. In my opinion, leaning the pedals is worth it.

Count me in as requesting sustain pedal implementation as an option (maybe not enabled by default). Here's my reasoning: I'm using Organteq as a stopgap measure while our church organ is being repaired. It is being played from a single 88-key keyboard. There are time when there are long pedal tones lasting as many as 16 bars. I would like to have an option to create a setup in MainStage where I could assign a layer for just those few notes to "listen" to the sustain pedal while the rest of the keyboard does not. A very practical way to solve a problem. Without this functionality my solution is to have a page turner (luxury) who will also hold down the long pedal tones!

Yes, I think you are right. Doesn't require opening Organteq up in MainStage to create layers with different settings. Thanks!

Hi, I presume you’ve already set zones on the 88-note keyboard that transmit on different channels when ‘talking’ to Organteq for the different manuals? Just make sure that sostenuto or sustain is transmitted on the same channel only as the pedalboard responds to.

For those who use Bitwig, someone just made a wonderfull grid preset. It holds the notes that are pressed while you send a cc66 (sostenuto), letting you to free your hands to play the next.
You can find it in the Bitwig Discord server ("sostenuto for everything " in the "your preset" folder).
Really great for foot bourdon.

I discovered a free VST3 plug-in which enables a sustain pedal in Organteq VST version.

SustainPedalVST, which can be downloaded from https://github.com/hamlen/SustainPedalVST  removes explicit pedal events from a MIDI stream by instead delaying note-off events until the pedal is released.

To use it in your DAW or VST host:

1.  Download SustainPedalVST.vst3 and put it in your VST3 directory.   The default vst3 directory in Windows is c:\program files\common files\vst3 .  Have a look or download its readme file.

2.  Start your DAW, create an FX track for SustainPedalVST.

3. Create a MIDI track, assign input to your keyboard, output to SustainPedalVST.

4.  Create an instrument track for Organteq.  Assign midi input to SustainPedalVST.

Works like a charm for the Organteq vst version.