Something is messing up MIDI keyboard entry. How to find and remove MIDI shortcuts?

[cparmerlee]

Recently, I find great difficulty using my MIDI keyboard (Nektar Panorama) to enter notes for electric bass. I do not believe there is any problem with the keyboard, as I can use all the keys (notes) as expected when running to the stand-alone Keystone Classic VST.

I never noticed this problem until several weeks ago. Here is what is happening. I can create a new Dorico score containing only a 4-string electric bass. I play MIDI notes chromatically starting with F downward. When I get to Db and C, those notes are missing, and never reach Halion Sonic.

I vaguely recall setting up MIDI shortcuts a long time ago. And I very well could have assigned commands to the C and Db, because, depending on the octave shift, these could have been the bottom two keys on my MIDI keyboard. But I am 99.99% certain I have done bass entry with MIDI many times since then without difficulty.

I am trying to check for any MIDI shortcuts under Preferences → KeyCommands
When I hit the Db, I see NOTEON37 appearing in the key command menu. Likewise for C and NOTEON36, so Dorico is definitely receiving the MIDI note, but not passing it on to Halion Sonic.

How can I find if there is a KeyCommand assigned to these MIDI notes? Is there a JSON file or something to look at?

Another peculiarity is that sometimes when I am experiencing this problem, the patch changes from electric bass to some vocal sound, but I don’t think that shows up as a new patch in Halion Sonic.

[Christian_R]

Hi @cparmerlee,
the midi command will be saved into the keycommands_en.json file that you find in your Dorico folder ~/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico 5 (on MacOS). The language definition letters depend on your used language for key commands (en for English, de for German and so on…)

Shut down Dorico, make a copy of that file as a backup in case something goes wrong, and then open out with a text editor, search for that MIDI:NOTEONxy(where xy is the number of the note) and delete carefully that string, or in case it has both a keyboard shortcut and a MIDI command shortcut, delete only the part of the MIDI shortcut, including the comma, but maintaining the square brackets. Save and that MIDI Key Command should not be active anymore.

Example:

[cparmerlee]

Thanks. As you were responding I just found (on my Windows 10 system)

… \AppData\Roaming\Steinberg\Dorico 5\keycommands_en.json

and it contained:

{
“Edit.ChangeLayoutTransposition?LayoutTransposition=kScoreInC” : [ “MIDI:NOTEON36” ]
},

  			{
  				"Edit.ChangeLayoutTransposition?LayoutTransposition=kTransposingScore" : [ "MIDI:NOTEON37" ]
  			},

I guess it was a brilliant idea at the time, but I never used it (intentionally) recently. Deleting those lines definitely fixes the problem. No more MIDI shortcuts for me.

It does seem that the Preference UI should provide a way to find these things, for dummies like me.