Disklavier

Good afternoon, everyone.

I am a little confused, Tobin. On the one hand you indicated that the  
dropouts on playback do not always occur in the same places each time  
you play back a file. That tells me that all of the MIDI data is  
present in the file. However, you also said that you checked the file  
and saw no MIDI data in the event list where dropouts occur.

The first and most important thing is to figure out if data is being  
continuously recorded during the performance. The event list should  
confirm this. If the data for the entire piece is present, you should  
be able to listen to the entire piece without dropouts by directing  
the MIDI output of the sequencer to an internal tone generator on your  
computer (QuickTime GM Synth on the Mac or Microsoft GS Wavetable SW  
Synth on Windows). Playback by those 2 soft synths may be muddy  
(because they don't understand incremental pedaling), but you will be  
able to confirm aurally that all of the notes are there.

Assuming that all of the notes are there, there should be no droupouts  
on playback by the piano. If there are, the most likely culprits are:

--sequencer
--the MIDI cables or interface
--the Disklavier

In the case of the Disklavier, overheating can cause playback  
dropouts. However, consistent overheating usually results in an error  
message on the control unit.

If you choose to record to high density floppy disks (formatted as  
HD), you should be able to get 2 hours of normal piano playing on a  
floppy (assuming that the piano is not a version called the Pro).

Regards,
PianoBench


On Aug 26, 2008, at 11:26 AM, slothmachine wrote:

> 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!