Once you own the keyboard you can do whatever you like 🙂

The jacks on the keyboard will determine what happens. The Foot Controller jacks are "looking for" a TRS jack, so plugging an FC4 does nothing to this. The FC3 has a TRS jack, but do you need a spring-loaded volume pedal? That's what would happen if you plugged it into the Foot Controller 1 jack.

The dedicated Sustain jack can accept either a TS (FC4/5) or TRS (FC3) jack and has a Utility mode parameter setting you must make to use properly.

If you are uncertain about which pedals to use for which functions please consult the Owner's Manual.

I guess I wasn't very clear. Let me rephrase that 🙂

Actually, to my understanding, the two foot controller inputs can accomodate FC7 (continuos) pedals to control an expression parameter (i.e. the volume or a voice attack); the two foot switch inputs can instead accomodate FC4/FC5 (on/off) pedals - let's put aside the FC3 with its half sustain function for now, as we already have too many pedals 😀

Now, my question is: can I obtain an on/off effect with one of the foot controller inputs?
Let's say that for a song I need three functionalities:

• sustain
• sostenuto
• play/stop (to play a prerecorded file)

Talking specifically about foot pedals, to me this would require three different foot switches.

But since I own the synth since less than two months and still had't had the necessary time to read the whole manual ( 🙁 ) I'm sure I'm missing something.

Sorry, I thought you were just experimenting to see what would happen... My bad.

Yes, three foot switch functions would require three Foot Switch jacks. There are only two.

What to do is easy... Use the Foot switches for Sustsin and Sostenuto, there is no substitute for these performance-wise.
There is a DEDICATED button for starting and stopping playback.

I was asked at a recent product training about how I learn so much about the product, it comes from tracing down things for hundreds of other users. To keep it interesting for myself, I often try to figure out why some things customers ask for are important (to them)... Anyway the conversation got around to the reason for the foot switch Start/Stop function request. You know: why a Foot Switch when there is a perfectly good button?

The answer I received most often was they didn't want the audience to see them pressing a button. Okay, your on stage with a keyboard, seconds later a full orchestra and drums is wailing away, they're gonna know you pushed some button. It was the thing of actually pressing the button that made them feel so vunerable - I fixed this for one such musician, by telling him to include several blank measures in front of the music data, so it wouldn't be apparent that this one button push was to start the band. I solved it for another by putting a two measure stick click count-in. I solved for another by simply making them realize most people in the audience don't care, only another keyboard would really know, and they'd be totally interested in what you doing so what's the downside?

But there's a perfectly good button for Play/Stop.

The sweep-type pedals would be inappropriate as a switch.