I originally thought this was a problem with the Native Instruments FM8 VST plugin that I use in Cubase 12 Pro. I posted over at their forums about it, however, and they tell me that, in fact, it’s a problem on the Cubase side. As such, I thought I’d post an edited version of my topic there to these forums in the hope of a better solution. Here follows my edited post from their forums:
This seems a bit weird to me, and I’ve found a workaround already, but I thought I’d post and ask the question to see if anyone else recognizes this issue. I had a MIDI track in Cubase 12 Pro with piano performance data on MIDI channel 9, completely with plenty of use of the sustain pedal as CC 64 also on MIDI channel 9. When I route the data on this channel to any of my external keyboards, the sustain pedal works as expected, holding the notes already playing.
I’m increasingly trying to get rid of my outboard gear, however, so I was using Native Instruments FM8 to emulate the DX7II-FD sound being produced externally. When I route that MIDI track data to the FM8 instance, however, the piano notes play just fine but the sustain pedal seems completely ignored. I verified the data was still there, and I searched the manual and FM8 UI for anything that seemed related without success. If I route data from my external keyboards to FM8 for recording, it responds just fine to the sustain pedal, but it ignores the pre-recorded MIDI CC 64 data on the MIDI track I have.
Finally, largely out of frustration and not really expecting anything to change, I opened up the MIDI piano-roll editor, selected all the controller data for the sustain pedal, and moved those events to MIDI channel 1. I was entirely surprised when the next time I routed that MIDI track to the FM8 instance and played it back, the plugin now handled the sustain pedal properly. It’s almost as if it responds to the sustain pedal only on MIDI channel 1 and was happy to apply it to all the note on/off data it was still receiving on MIDI channel 9.
Is this a bug? Or a feature? I obviously have a way I can work around it, but I would think the plugin should respect sustain pedal data on the same channel as the note on/off data its playing. I don’t know what to make of this. Thanks in advance.