Will The FCB1010 Work With My MIDI Gear?
A common question with the FCB1010 is whether it will work with the users MIDI gear. There are hundreds of firms that make MIDI gear and thousands of models. As a general rule, the FCB1010 can work with most of them.
Getting it to work with your gear usually involves a few key steps
Being sure both are operating on the same MIDI channel (there are 16)
Setting your gear to accept MIDI commands (many do not by default)
Setting the FCB1010 to send the commands you need
Most MIDI gear falls into one of three levels of MIDI control capabilities:
Provides little support
Provides a lot of support
Lets you do just about anything via MIDI
Marshall makes a tube based rack mounted guitar preamp called the JMP-1, which is basically a category A type device. The only MIDI support it offers is basic preset selection. You can't even change the volume via MIDI.
Line 6 makes a variety of guitar modelers called POD, which are basically category B devices. These offer extended MIDI support with mostly fixed options. You can control lots of different things, but you have to do it exactly the Line 6 way.
For example with the POD 2.0 bean, you can turn distortion on or off with CC# 25. A MIDI value of 0 turns it off and a value of 127 turns it on. Your only choice for this however is CC # 25.
TC Electronics makes a guitar effects device called a G-Major, which is basically a category C device. You can do just about anything via MID with this device.
Suppose you want to control reverb on or off. There is not a fixed CC for this. You have to pick one and then assign it within the G-Major to the reverb effect. Then you program the FCB1010 to send that CC number as part of a preset. Basically lots of flexibility, but more steps before it works.
While the category C devices are the most flexible, they are generally the most difficult to work with. Unlike Line 6 approach, they force you to make more decisions about what you want to control via MIDI and how you want to control it. For the novice new to MIDI, this can be a daunting task.
Keyboards can also be difficult. Many keyboards supports hundreds of sounds arranged into multiple banks. So to select a particular sound you must get the keyboard to both change the current bank and then select the sound within that bank.
Fortunately the FCB1010 was designed with this in mind. When an FCB1010 preset is selected, the PC1 through PC4 commands are sent first. Then the CC1 and CC2 commands are send, then the PC5 command. So if you use CC1 and/or CC2 to change banks you can put the desired preset into PC5, and one button press will change both at the same time.
When working with MIDI gear, there are two key things to use:
The FCB1010 users manual (plus other info like what is here)
The users manual for your gear
You will generally need to read through both to determine how best to set things up to do what you want.
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