Hi everyone,
I own an fcb1010 which I am starting to play with. I have swapped the stock prom chip for a Uno 1.0.4 but I am not sure it provides the best experience with the mod as the number of “stomp boxes” buttons is somehow limited.
Has any of you experienced the Eurekaprom with the Mod ?
Is there another prom out there that I wouldn’t know of an worth trying with the mod ?
Would there be an easy way to create a prom for the fcb1010 that is ideally suited for Mod users ?
Hi…
I´v been using EurekaProm on my FCB1010 for a long time, and it´s really great !! When I was testing with ModDuo, the results was increadible !! Even the switch buttons, and the Expression and Volume pedals works really great.
I recomend.
If you want some additional information, just ask…
My Duo is being shipped at the moment (!!!) so I don’t have any firsthand experience to share pairing the two devices. I have used the FCB1010 a little with Mainstage and recently with SooperLoooper.
When I first tried using the FCB with Mainstage, I had a bad experience because Mainstage didn’t seem to be able to recognize or differentiate between the codes that were being sent per button. My resolution was to spend $20 on a nice little tool called [iFCB(http://www.wabbitwanch.com/iFCB.html).
The iFCB tool lets you reprogram everything in a graphical interface - much saner than trying to it directly on the FCB I’d guess. With that I assigned a nice linear progression of (CC, value) to each bank of buttons (the middle column):
WIth a configuration like this, the “learn” functions of the few apps I’ve tried have worked well. Unfortunately iFCB is OSX only, and I haven’t looked for other tools. With the relatively popularity of the FCB1010 in these communities it would be nice to have an open source, cross-platform tool for doing re-programs of the device, especially if it included a few sane default templates.
ripwerx. Its a bit dated, but it still works fine. http://ripwerxcom.ipage.com/RipwerxFcb1010Editor.html
http://mountainutilities.eu/fcb1010 is freeware and actively maintained. Might be worth a try.
Hi everyone, and thanks for your feedback !
My original question was more about the firmware to use than about the accompanying software, although I agree that it is an important thing too.
With the original Behringer firmware, I was quite frustrated that I could not use any button as a stompbox, i.e : when stepping on a particular button, it acts as a “patch” meaning that the led comes up on that one and off on the other ones. Therefore, you can’t tell if an effect that you have switched on with the previous button is still on or not.
With the UnO firmware, it is a bit better as you can set 5 buttons (top or bottom row, your choice) to act as stomp boxes. But the midi message they send and their behaviour (latched/toggling or not) is fixed once and for all and does not depend on which “patch” you have selected before that. Therefore, you are force to using always the same CCs for instance and are limited to 5 out of the 10 buttons for this.
It would be great if all the buttons could be set to act as stompboxes and that the up/down buttons (used for selecting patch banks) could be used to switch between preprogrammed configuration sets for these stompboxes (is that what is called scenes ?).
Another good thing would be to be able to send more than 2CCs per button, instead of 5PC, just 2CC and and a note on, as I don’t believe PCs are very useful for the ModDuo.
Is the Eureka closer to my wishlist ? Or is there a way to configure the UnO better ? Or is there another firmware that I don’t know about ?
EDIT: Ah, and also, I have realized that when using a stompbox with toggle-mode off (so it is just ‘on’ while you keep pushing on it), two midi messages are being sent : one on the push, and one on the release, which makes it kind of unusable for controlling the “undo” button of the SuperLooper pluggin, as it results in undoing twice instead of only once ! I believe there should be a way to make SuperLooper ignore the every second midi messages on this button, or maybe I missed something about it. What do you think @falkTX ?
Maybe a nice idea would be to get in touch with the Eureka guys, so that they add the Mod to the list of their supported devices !
In that case, I think it would be good to discuss first what would be the ideal behaviour from our point of view.
Hi @Azza
I checked on the behavior of mine. I’ve never modified the firmware, bought from US Amazon.com 1.5 years ago. I have reprogrammed the codes for all the bank+button sets using a scheme of (bank+1, button number) for the first CC. I’ve cleared out all the second CC.
My buttons also work in the “patch” mode where the last pressed button has its LED active, replacing the prior active LED.
So far I haven’t been able to duplicate the Undo behavior you have with SooperLooper - it works as expected for me, undoing one dub at a time. I also tried setting an additional CC for one of the buttons (button 8 set to: first CC: 1,8 second CC: 88, 14). Undo works as expected and I confirmed the MIDI binding in SL prefs as “ch1 - cc - 8”
A MIDI monitor tool might be useful to see what is coming out of the device per button press. I was using “MIDI Monitor” for OSX. I haven’t yet seen the behavior where a button release sends a message. I tried with the 8 button from above and I can see both CC messages in the monitor while I’m still holding the button down.
I’m not yet familiar with various firmware modes and overrides but I’ll start researching as I’m now starting to use the FCB a lot more.
This site has an example SYSEX file for a stompbox config for the Uno firmware: http://host.mtnsys.com:81/faq-fcb/ExampleSysexFiles.htm. The description implies that you might need to do some additional editing to enable the buttons.
I also found this, which implies that a stompbox mode can be achieved with the factory chip/firmware. Maybe I’ll pay the $10 for science and try to see what they’ve done in the .syx file
http://www.wabbitwanch.com/FCB_Bridge.html
Thanks for your comment.
The SuperLooper issue is only when using the Uno’s stompbox mode with toggling set off. When toggling is on, only one message is sent per pressing/releasing cycle. I could just work with this, but it is irritating to have the led on, then off, then on, without “meaningful reason”.
And, yes, what I don’t like with the original Behringer patch mode is precisely the problem of the LED being active only for the last pressed button. It is very easy to loose track of which effect is on or off. On stage, or while recording, you have other things to keep in mind that a mental map of all your effect’s states.
I run Linux and there are plenty of ways to monitor which midi messages are being sent by the FCB1010.
Thank you too. I’m learning about this device on the fly and it looks like you’ve already done a fair bit of research, so you’re helping me connect the dots.
According to http://www.fcb1010.eu/downloads/FCB_UnO_v1_0_4_UserGuide.pdf your toggle off mode is probably referring to the “Momentary toggling”:
A special case of “momentary toggling’ is implemented: in this mode, a CC message
with programmed value is sent when clicking a footswitch, and the same CC message,
this time with value 0, is sent when releasing the footswitch. This mode is enabled in a
very specific way: by setting the alternate CC value to 1 and disabling the CC toggling.
…confirming why SooperLooper is getting the double messages as you’ve described. Have you confirmed whether the second message can be overridden in one of the editors, or does the firmware allow it? Could you work around this by changing the second message to something not in use? Alternatively you could put a custom MIDI filter into your chain that would drop every other message from the mapped Undo buttons 
Thanks a lot ! I have read the manual but missed the second CC config bit. That will help a lot !
Now remains the limitation that not all 10 buttons can be set as stomboxes and that they can’t be reconfigured by changing the present bank.
I use the FCB1010 with the Eurekaprom 3 and its Works perfectly on stompbox mode.
The only thing that could be better would be if the two FCB programming change footswiches also worked like MIDI like the other buttons (UP and DOWN buttons.
I like your labels, nice work!
That looks good ! Is it the standard config ? That would be awesome if you could give us a bit of detail about how to get this setup working from straight after you replaced the PROM !
Additionally : is the number of CCs sent by one stompbox still limited to 2 (as it is with the UnO and the Behringer stock prom) ?
Is there a way to reassign these CCs on the fly by switching banks (in other words, does the config of your 10 stompboxes depend on the selected up/down level, so that we could have 100 different stompboxes in total ?)
Well, I’m going to owe you the CC numbers, although I do not know how this works. I simply bought the chip and changed it. The FCB must be in Effect mode (EF) to function as stompbox, nor do you need to be selecting this, when we call the FCB it already remembers where it was last connected. Then in the MOD itself I use “MIDI learn” and that’s it. In use, when I click the FCB button the led lights up and the effect turns on, if floor again it turns off and the respective LED goes out, I can turn the effects on and off independently.
I did not try to assign “tap tempo” to them, because the buttons are not as soft as the MOD and in case the led would not flash at the corresponding speed.
I tried at some time to use MOD MIDI plugins, my interest was to make the expression pedal channels assign different values, because as I bought the used FCB I could not calibrate them to get to “0”, they always stay in the range Of 20 - 120. However I believe that I was not using the plugins right, in another opportunity I will do some more tests and I will put the result here.
Thanks !
Hi everyone,
I chose the UnO. See this post:
Could you fix this problem somehow? I’m currently dealing with the same here. Didn’t really bother me until i wanted to use the whammy. For this it makes it useless…
