Disklavier

Athomik & George,

Thank you very much for replying with such good suggestions.  
Athomik, I think your suggestion is best to actually record on the 
piano itself, in addition to sending it through the MIDI outputs.  I 
think the reason we didn't do that the first time is that those 
floppy disks don't hold that much information, so we would have ended 
up continually replacing them.  We could be wrong though about how 
much info they hold.  About how much time does one of those disks 
hold?  (I know that with MIDI it's not time that takes the space, but 
the number of notes played, but just assuming that he's playing some 
normal piano music, how much time...)

George, to answer your questions, the dropouts don't always occur in 
the same place, but they seem to almost always last for about 33 
seconds.  This is kind of what made me rule out faulty cables, 
because it would just be too much of a coincidence that cables would 
fail, several times, each lasting 30 seconds.  The behaviour would 
seem to me that it's some device along the way, whether it's the 
piano sending to the DKC100R, the DKC100R sending to the MIDI 
interface into the computer, or the MIDI interface into the computer, 
that somehow gets overloaded with info and takes 30 seconds 
to "restart" itself at which point it continues to spit out MIDI info.

The MIDI and audio both get recorded simultaneously into the 
sequencer REAPER, and yes, we're certain that for those dropouts 
there is no MIDI at all.  You just have to look at an event list to 
see that there's nothing there.

Also George, as per your suggestion, I will instruct the engineer to 
pay close attention to the flashing lights on the MIDI interface 
while he records to make sure that that is being recorded correctly. 

Thanks again for your help, I now have some very useful information 
for when we go into the studio next.

Sincerely,
Tobin



--- In disklavier@yahoogroups.com, "George F. Litterst" 
<PianoBench@...> wrote:
>
> Good morning, everyone.
> 
> I recommend looking at the MIDI data carefully on the computer and  
> determine with certainty whether that MIDI data is present.
> 
> Assuming that the MIDI data is present, I think that it is worth  
> determining:
> 
> --whether the dropouts always occur at the same places on playback
> 
> --determine what happens if you start playback at a location where  
> there is a dropout
> 
> --look at the MIDI status LEDs on the MIDI interface (if there are  
> any) during playback and see if the interface shows MIDI data going 
to  
> the piano during the dropout
> 
> How are you synchronizing the audio and the data? Are they both 
being  
> played by the same sequencer?
> 
> Regards,
> PianoBench
> 
> On Aug 25, 2008, at 7:00 PM, slothmachine wrote:
> 
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I recently had a recording session that used a Disklavier. We 
needed
> > to record the actual piano sounds as well as get the corresponding
> > MIDI. For the most part, it worked well. Our resulting audio files
> > are great, and the corresponding MIDI almost always matches
> > perfectly. There were a few exceptions though. In a few of the
> > files, the MIDI would cut out for almost exactly 30 seconds, then
> > after that silence, it would return, still in sync with the audio.
> >
> > There are a few possible explanations for this. It's certainly
> > possible that the MIDI interface going into the computer was 
faulty
> > in some way (audio and MIDI both recorded into Reaper). Me feeling
> > though is that it was probably something getting stuck on the
> > Disklavier's end. The exact devices were Disklavier II, and the
> > controller that spit out the MIDI was a DKC100R.
> >
> > Has anyone else had similar issues? Any suggestions for how to fix
> > this? We're planning on going back to the same studio, with the 
same
> > setup, in a few days, so we were hoping to have something new to 
try.
> >
> > I did try searching previous posts for "lost MIDI", but wasn't 
able
> > to find anything pertinent.
> >
> > Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks very much!
>