Recently I had a Sampler Track stop producing sound mid-playback. After poking around awhile I figured out that the Filter Cutoff had been changed from 3KHz to about 15Hz which was caused by my nanoKontrol transmitting the setting of one of its knobs which changed a Quick Control for the cutoff frequency.
I understand that physical vibrations (or apparently just looking at it) can cause a controller to transmit a setting. As an experiment I left it on a set of Quick Controls for an hour or so and noticed several changes over that time. At a practical level this makes it dangerous to use with Focus QC - risking random changes to settings anywhere that has focus for even a moment. Currently itâs unplugged. Iâm wondering what ideas folks have to deal with this? Maybe itâs just to use a better quality controller.
I have more or less the same problem with two endless knobs of my Akai MPD32 controller, which is getting old (more than ten years, alreadyâŚ).
I have set the misbehaving endless knobs, in the MIDI remote editor, for Cubase UI control (zooming, cursor placementâŚ), any audio tasks being controlled by either the 6 others reliable ones or the 8 faders also available. If things are going worse in a more or less foreseeable future, Iâll resolve myself to set them as âNo mappingâ.
Actually, it seems that the involved knobs are working reliably when you use them out of Cubase several times rapidly, as if a kind of warm-up was needed. But I have to remind myself to do so, before each Cubase session, which is rather cumbersome. This, to avoid any erratic Cubase behavior.
Are you sure itâs the controller and not Cubases Toy Mapper ?
I have a slightly similar thing with STEINBERGS owns QC controller that they decided to stop supporting right at the being of this new toy introduction ( i wonder why ahh ) All Qcâs are broken and when assigning them on the midi button knob 7 controls two parameters and thereâs nothing i can do to stop it or reset it so to me i think unless your the new breed of Cubase Script users then itâs useless .
Maybe by Cubase 15 it might actually work but until then if Generic is removed i can see a rather large shitstorm coming
Using Relative mode (rather than absolute mode) for MIDI CC can lessen the impact of inadvertent changes. But that generally only works with endless encoders.
But it doesnât make the problem of inadvertent changes fully go away.
Random changes in the lower bits are going to be inevitable for all but the highest quality (read highest priced/overengineered) devices. Itâs just something that happens.
The problem here is that the controllers has no feedback and has been remapped, Suppose its been set to 100 when controlling one parameter, if it is noisy then that parameter could be changed to 99 or 101. Not a big deal. The problem is that itâs been remapped to a new parameter, so the control is still at 100 but the param value is 10. When the controller wobbles from 100 to 101 the parameter jumps from 10 to 101 - a big deal.
The best fix is to send the controller feedback - so for example a motorised fader would move from 100 to 10 when itâs remapped, so then any wobble would be to 9 or 11. Great, but needs hardware that can handle it.
As Nico says, relative mode also helps, as then the controller is sending up or downs rather than specific values.
The other option is to look at the âTakeoverâ mode. The default tis Jump which gives the above behaviour. Pickup means the controller wonât do anything until it reaches the parameter position, so you need to turn it to 10 before it starts controlling the parameter. I like scaled where moving the fade adjusts the parameter immediately but it blends the param value to the controller value, so a controller wobble to 99, would decrease the parameter value to maybe 9, but wouldnâtâ cause a jump.
You should be able to experiment with pickup mode in the midi remote mapping easily.
