Stuck notes:

All midi notes have 2 very important signals in them.... the ON signal, telling the synth when it's supposed to start the note, and of course the OFF signal telling it... yup, you guessed it.... when to stop playing that note. Of course there are many more signals in the data for the note... velocity, pitch, volume, etc.... but we're not worried about those in this conversation.

A note gets stuck on for a few possible reasons.

1. Something happened to make the synth miss the off signal...

2. The computer decides to glitch, or the driver or the synth itself, and essentially lock up due to a driver issue or something else in the OS.... since many synths load to memory, a corruption of that load will do it too.

Most DAW's and programs that work with MIDI will have some sort of EMERGENCY KILL SWITCH on the dashboard that will immediately send the off signal to the synth. You should always learn where that button is located.

If you work with audio, there's a very small chance you will ever get a stuck note.... although I have seen audio loops when something corrupts the OS and the computer is about to crash. My old laptop is prone to OS crashes and the audio loop freeze before the BSOD happens to it occasionally.

Most likely, though, stuck notes happen when working with MIDI synths. I used to do a lot of MIDI stuff in my early days and this stuck note thing is fairly common in that realm. In many cases, I could hit the KILL SWITCH, and everything would be fine. It simply reset the synth.

Last edited by Guitarhacker; 02/22/16 03:14 AM.
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