Topic: Expression pedal or joystick

[jcm2016]

I have a CVP 805 nd I used to have a PSR-SX900.  Overall I'm super happy with the change.  But I do miss the joystick for pitch adjustment on things like guitars and some woodwinds.

I have an expression pedal, and I can set that to pitch bend (or use one of the three attached pedals).  But I can't figure out if there's a way to bend both up and down.  In other words, have the expression pedal at neutral while partly pressed, and have it adjust both up and down.   Is this possible?

Also, is it possible to get a joy stick and attach it as an auxiliary and work like the joystick on the PSR-SX900?

Thanks in advance

[Amwilburn]

You could set the left pedal to bend down and the middle pedal to bend up (or whichever 2 you decide) but sadly, their pitch bend ranges are locked together.
You will find it more practical to simply bend down with a single pedal though.

Don't have any midi joysticks to try it with, but I can't see why that wouldn't work

[mikf]

You can put the pedal in the middle, then upwards movement bends up, and downwards bends down, …but this is impractical because the keyboard would then be off pitch, because half way on the pedal would not be full pitch. You could compensate for this theoretically by re-tuning the keyboard, but that would be a little crazy, because I dont think you could ever guarantee parking the pedal in the exact position every time.
So I believe you may be thinking about this wrongly. Most of the time you want to bend notes up to full pitch. This means setting the pedal where full up is full pitch, downward movement bends down. Then you depress the pedal just a little, a fraction before striking the note, and let the pedal move back up to full pitch. This gets a nice bend effect. I set my pedal to about 2 semi tone range, full up is full pitch, and direction such that pressing down pitches the note 2 semi tones down.
But you never press it all the way down. By setting to about 2 semi tone full range, the pedal movement needed is small. And another benefit is that moving the pedal even less amount down and back quickly several times produces a vibrato effect.
It might seem difficult, but I found it pretty natural, and I am sure anyone can do it with practice. You can soon get the feel of the amount and speed.

To demonstrate this I attach two recordings. The first is very short using the sax voice, and done in just a couple of minutes on my CVP.  I recorded a short phrase without bend, then a repeat with the expression pedal on pitch bend. I like to not overdo the effect, so it is subtle, but hopefully you can hear the difference.

https://app.box.com/s/9t2v2679vc8m5yovwo66g7nusip4q9gm

The second is an old and longer recording made on a psr3000. It shows the effect on guitar voice. This had a joystick, but I always used the expression pedal to pitch bend, because it was much easier than trying to fit joystick movement between chords.
https://app.box.com/s/mv78f0klsu8wkrlz2o0sol958neyq2q5

The/one thing you cannot do this way is to simulate a guitarists, raising pitch by pulling (stretching) the string, but I can live without that.

BTW, on a CVP you can plug the expression pedal into a fourth connection. I leave the other three set to sustain, tap tempo, start/stop accmnt. (From right to left). This works great. The one thing I would never do is to use one of the three pedals for pitch bend, it just doesn’t work as well as what I describe with the expression pedal.

Mike

[jcm2016]

Thanks very much for your he responses, I'll give that a try.