Sustain missing in GarageBand from Yamaha PSR-EW310

Hi there,

I have a Yamaha PSR-EW310 keyboard with a physical sustain pedal connected. It's all plugged into my MacBook via USB and I'm using it as a MIDI controller in GarageBand.

GB recognises the key presses fine, and I can play, but it's not translating the sustain pedal data into actual sustain either in or out of recording mode.

What's interesting is that the keyboard certainly does seem to be sending data when I depress the pedal: in the screenshot below, the four vertical bars coincide with me depressing the pedal. So I don't _think_ it's an issue with the hardware not sending it through.

How can I get GB to apply the sustain when the pedal is pressed, or at least debug further?

Thanks a lot!

Posted on Jul 10, 2023 3:18 AM

Top-ranking reply

unwttng Author

Level 1

4 points

Posted on Jul 12, 2023 1:59 AM

Answering this myself because I found a fix buried online for a slightly different Yamaha model, and it worked for mine too. For some reason, the MIDI signal sent in normal operation isn't quite right: I suspect the keyboard is sending both the pedal-down and pedal-up signals immediately after each other. Whatever it is, it's an actual bug with the keyboard firmware.

Thankfully, in a slightly different mode, the keyboard sends the pedal signals correctly. Turning on "Duo Mode" via the keyboard's functions menu fixes things. However, it also breaks the keyboard in two pitch-wise, so you also need to make an adjustment: set "Duo L Octave" and "Duo R Octave" both to 0. It can be helpful to use your keyboard's settings register to be able to load this set of configs quickly, since they reset when turning the keyboard off and on.

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Sustain missing in GarageBand from Yamaha PSR-EW310

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