Daily Archives: April 19, 2009

As many folks know, in the MIDI protocol, there is actually a particular control number for volume which is CC#11.  However, in MIDI-speak this is called expression so as not to confuse anyone with the volume of a fader in a sequence.  However, in order to add life to your arrangements, it is often very practical to embed this expression information within the recording in real-time and then use the volume faders of your sequence to “balance” things later on in mix-down.

For a lot of folks, this is a mind-numbing process of drawing various shapes in some sort of editor.  For the luckier among us, our controller keyboard may have a port to plug in a continuous pedal of some kind.  Or, our keyboard may have some moveable faders that are hard-coded to transmit certain MIDI signals.  The question is: are any of these CC#11?  And if not, how can you “re-purpose” one to do this?

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