Debugging can drive one batty

[musicman691]

These last couple of weeks I've been having strange problems reworking a bunch of sessions (24 or so) I did in PT 11.3.2 back in 2018. These were all for a play. Not having some of the plugins I used back then I had to change to what I had. Didn't have the bug where when you change a vi on an instrument track PT loses the assignment (at least not yet). These were new things like:

Notes cutting off when they shouldn't with the instrument track MIDI still live - remedied by restarting transport. These were sample based vi's reading samples off my sample ssd. East West Play engine and Kontakt engine.

Sudden volume changes and not always at the same spot. No automation anywhere.

MIDI input comes from my ancient original Motif 7 connected via 5 pin DIN to a MOTU MIDI Timepiece AVUSB. Volume pedal sending cc7 to the Motif and the same with a sustain pedal for sustain messages. As I watched things happening it always happened to the track that was highlighted. That means something in the MIDI chain was goofy. Since it was a chain and I have no other way of getting MIDI into the computer I first shut down the Motif. The problem went away so that cleared the MIDI interface - no garbage in so no garbage out. And put it all on the Motif.

Changing MIDI cables didn't help. What did help was to disconnect the volume and sustain pedals from the Motif and there were no more problems. Fixing the volume pedal should be easy - a shot of contact cleaner in the works. The sustain pedal - not so much especially if the switch has gone wack-a-doodle. At this point I'm not totally exonerating the Motif itself as it's ancient as I said before and I've had to tear it apart to fix defective controls and slider before. If it's one of the IC's inside that took a hit I could replace it IF I had a schematic and could get the parts. Therein lies the rub - would Yamaha even have what I need? And yes I have the tech chops and tools to get that kind of work done.