Hi musicman, I did not find a way to keep the leslie on, at least without any drawback. Here is a summary of the possible solutions. The last one should solve your problem completely but it's expensive ($150).
- You can assign leslie speed to any CC message. So you can assign it to the hold pedal, but this means that as soon as you release the hold pedal, leslie speed goes back to slow. And you will not be able to use the hold pedal to sustain notes. Anyway, this is the solution I'm using.
- You can assign leslie speed for example to the Cutoff or Resonance knob, so that when you turn the knob the leslie speed varies. This works, but of course turning the knob is not as fast as pressing a pedal or a switch.
You can of course combine the two methods.
If you don't use the volume pedal, here's the best solution:
- Buy a latch pedal, and connect it to the control pedal plug. Then assign the control pedal (usually assigned to VOLUME), to HOLD-2. This setting is system-wide. Then, in the organ patches assign leslie speed to HOLD-2.
- If you use the volume pedal, you could try to assign leslie speed to VOLUME and reprogram the patch to ignore VOLUME CC (I think it should be possible... maybe in a performance, anyway I'm not sure). In this way, in the organ patches the volume pedal would control leslie speed. This of course would mean that you can't use volume on organ patches.
This last solution should solve the problem completely:
- buy this thing:
http://www.midisolutions.com/prodfsw.htm
and connect a sustain pedal to it. The device also seems to have a toggle on/off option, so you don't even need a latch pedal.
The price of that thing is really high IMHO if you compare it to what it does.
- a cheaper option could be to build something yourself or look if there is a midi foot controller or programmable midi pedal that can solve your problem.
If somebody has other solutions they will be welcome!!!
