I have been making midi tracks on logic that sync to playback tracks for live use. The midi would do two things, change presets at the start of songs and change scenes through a song in time with the music. Everything was functioning correctly for months and all of a sudden my volume pedal has started jumping to zero every single time I launch a track. Even if I move the volume pedal to 100 it jumps back almost instantly to zero. The presets are saved with volume being at 100.
I assume this is caused by either a new glitch in the QC or by Logic sending a signal to the QC that tells it to do this
The truly frustrating part is that these presets have functioned correctly for months, I changed nothing and suddenly this has started.
I updated to Cos 4 but that changed nothing.
Presets function normally until I launch Logic, then the volume instantly jumps
Removing the volume block does prevent this from happening, however I use the volume quite often on stage
Is anyone else having a similar issue, and does anyone know how to fix this?
It maybe position detect glitching but as it was working fine for months and started doing this before the newest update it seems really out of the blue. The exp position could be set anywhere and it still happens… seems quite random as well because I’ve discovered different songs behave differently as well.
I have tried a back up and reset as well with no change.
I’m going to try and get a video up to show more of whats going on.
I’m truly at a loss because it seems like the bug will have random effects like cutting the volume in half turning the volume off once at the start of a track, or doing either of those randomly through out the song
No cc1 or cc2 messages. I would think that logic was sending a ghost cc1 message but some songs just jump to 40% volume like I show in the video. It’s really strange. I’ve been doing more research and it seems there have been bugs with exp controls since day one that have never been fixed.
I’ve discovered a few triggers for this happening. Closing and opening projects in logic always sets the exp pedal to off. I have also found that certain audio tracks can trigger it.
In one song the exp would switch to off in measure 9 and there was no midi data being sent at that time. I started deleting audio tracks one by one and discovered that the bass audio starts playing at the exact moment that the exp pedal was turning off. After removing the bass track and adding the other audio tracks back in it stoped doing this. I added the bass back and it started again.
It has to be an error in how your session is set up. I know a ton of bands who send midi to the Quad’s and don’t have this issue. There must be a midi signal that Logic is sending from your session that you haven’t noticed.
It’s clear that logic is sending ghost midi info when closing/opening projects but there are issues that I can’t make sense of. As I said in my previous post, its also happening in some tracks as they play and I have traced a few instances of audio triggering the exp pedal turning off. Not sure why that would be the case (previous post has more details)
I don’t know if it is logic’s issue or the QC’s at this point but it was working without any issue for months and then suddenly started happening. That doesn’t mean its for sure the QC but its strange to me that logic would just decide to start sending random signals. Nothing changed and no updates were done on either device prior to the start of the issue.
It started off as an occasional glitch that I would fix by just moving the volume pedal. Over about 2 weeks it slowly started happening more and more to the point of the tracks being unusable.
I can pull up a list of midi info being sent out from my laptop and there is no trigger that shows it should be doing this.
I believe this would serve as proof that the issue is with the QC and not logic. Logic isn’t even open during this and it still isn’t reading that the volume should be at 100. the exp pedal is at 100 in this video and once I move it, it returns back to normal use. If I load the patch that was saved being at 100 then it automatically turns it off. It seems there is an issue on the QC’s end where it loses the location of the exp pedal until new information is sent.
I looked it up and it seems a few people have this issue over the course of years. From what I’ve seen there hasn’t been a solution made for it.
Not sure whether you were operating under the following assumptions or even if the following will apply to your issue, but maybe it will help your troubleshooting:
No parameter that is assigned to an expression pedal can be saved with a preset or scene. The pedal is always the master and any parameter assigned to it will be overridden by the pedal position, regardless of the value when the preset/snapshot was saved. Parameters assigned to an expression pedal are ignored by the save process.
So, if your expression pedal is plugged in and assigned, when you switch to a preset/scene, the volume block will come on at your current expression pedal’s setting. Regardless of whether it was at 100% when you saved the preset/scene.
From the 4.0 QC manual:
The current parameter position and toe-switch polarity are not stored when saving Presets. Instead, the current position and toe-switch state are preserved when loading Presets.
When a parameter is assigned to an expression pedal, its values are excluded from Scene data and will not change when switching Scenes.
Good to know, thank you! What’s interesting to me is that when I load certain logic projects it jumps from 100% to another number. If its not saving that way then that has to mean there is a CC coming through somewhere but its certainly not showing up in any list I can see
That occurring randomly in the middle of a song stuff sounds elusive, barring a QC bug. Unless you are changing presets mid-song. Perhaps as @hosko suggested, you are getting unintended CC messages.
In the way of normal behavior as a testing baseline:
If you have your expression pedal plugged in to the QC, and have the level assigned for the volume block, then the preset/snapshot should be reflecting the pedal’s setting when loaded.
Unassigning the pedal from the volume block will allow you to manually save your volume block level settings.
Unplugging physically the expression pedal on a preset where the volume block’s level is still assigned to it, should always result in the level being 100%.
It could be you don’t have a Bank select message at the beginning of your External Midi instrument track in Logic :
CC32 value 1 for « My Presets » to start with so that the QC actually loads from to the correct bank (I had that issue).
Then I follow with CC0 val 0 to be sure I select patches 1-128, then the Program change message.
I also reset my expression pedals (CC1 for exp 1- value 0 heel down for Wah off in my case - and CC2 for exp 2 slur 127 toe) at the start and end of each track (=song).
Also I have noted that each time I add a controller (whatever I want to do like a CC43 for scene change for instance) in the Event editor in Logic, it will initially always default to CC1 (which is your exp 1) to which ever value was entered with the previous edit, that immediately changes the value in the QC and I need to either replay my song from the start or move my exp1
