How do I copy/paste pedal events in midi piano track?

Hey All,
 
I'm new to editing midi data...
 
After looking for 2 hours... I though I would be slightly smarter and ask you fine people!
When ever I try to record a piano part, using midi, it never seems to record the first pedal down event... so the piano sounds horrible until the player starts pedaling again and then all is fine. So...
 
1 Why does Sonar miss the first midi control pedal info when I record? and how to fix that.
 
2. How can I copy and edit a pedal down and then pedal up event from another part of the song to paste into where it's missing so I don't have to re-track the piano part (and have it miss it again anyway! ;-)
 
3. Oh, one more question.  is there a way to have quantize smooth out the little tempo accelerations and slow downs, rather than "fix them" completely? maybe average them out to a main tempo, but allow the subtle ebb and flow of the overall tempo to allow for musical tempo relaxations still?  I like the overall performance and the obvieously ****s are good... it's the few places where notes speed up and down because the player is young and not that consistent in a few places that I want to fix.
 
Thank you in advance!
 
Bruce
 

Hi,
 
I'm not using a metronome pre count... just starting at zero time, clicking record and letting the musican start playing when ever they want... it should capture the foot pedal event but never does unless a key note is played first. It's like it's not listening until after they keys are triggered.
 
Also, I really need to know how to copy a pedal event on/off from one place to another. I can't seem to select these sorts of events unless I get the notes too... and then I can't paste them without pasting the notes which makes a mess of notes with the ones already there so it's too hard to clean up after that. I have this problem every time I track a midi keyboard so having a simple way to copy/paste a pedal event would at least let me fix the beginning of the take and keep going.
 
I'll try the other suggestion on the time/quant.
 
Thanks!
 
Bruce

Try drawing the sustain events. It is also possible to drag the events to position them. To move more than one event, lasso then drag them into position. For more on selecting controller events see https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=SONAR&language=3&help=EditingMIDI.23.html
 

Bruce, that's really bizarre. Maybe have the player just hit a few random keys and pedal presses (which you'd then delete) before they start playing the actual piece. Otherwise I'd look into what Scook mentioned above, drawing and selecting controller information. Unfortunately, I can't be of much help when it comes to that...