Palmer Hogen

For an interactive piece that I'm working on, I need one more controller, or even a toggle that I can enable and disable freely would work, and since my hands will be full during the performance, I figured I would try to do this with a foot pedal. However, I don't have any USB or MIDI foot pedals, but I do have a damper pedal that connects to my electric keyboard via one quarter inch jack.

If this were a volume control pedal, I could extract position information from it by splitting its signal, and plugging one quarter inch cable into an output on my interface and the other into an input, then feeding it a constant audio signal and receiving the altered signal to measure the peaks, but since this is a damper pedal, can I still do that? I don't have a splitter on hand, so I would have to go buy one, and I'm reluctant to do so until I know whether that would work.

In short, is there a way that I can extract position information from this Korg DS-2H Damper Pedal?

korg-damper-pedal-used-control

Unless I saw something implying otherwise, I would assume that this pedal is just an on/off switch. Are you looking for continuous position or just up/down?

Position information? If you mean the equivalent of the position of an expression pedal, then I don't see how.

The only thing I can think of to get a range of values out of a simple on/off switch would be to time how long you hold it down for.

Or, to get, say, 3 or 4 values count how many times you press it in quick succession.

The only thing I can think of to get a range of values out of a simple on/off switch would be to time how long you hold it down for. 

Or, to get, say, 3 or 4 values count how many times you press it in quick succession.


When I plug the damper pedal into my midi controller and use that midi controller in Reason, the pedal seems to have 4 different "positions" that it snaps to based on how much the pedal is pressed (picture attached). If I use that same midi controller with the pedal plugged in, and put it into Max, I can only seem to get pedal on/pedal off messages. That's not the end of the world, all that I really need for this piece is a toggle of sorts, HOWEVER, it would be cumbersome to have a midi keyboard present for the piece that I'm not playing at all and that only serves as an intermediary between the pedal and my computer. Is there any way that I can transmit the On/Off messages (or better yet, all four positions) WITHOUT the pedal being attached to my keyboard (IE by plugging it into my interface)?

Korg Damper Pedal used as Control