Also, out of interest, for my guitar oriented project, instead of the FC300, I am using my Line 6 Helix and its “command centre” to do similar control of Cantabile that I would normally do on the FC300.
I was going to try a Line 6 BassPod XT pedal that’s lying around. It’s got a pedal, it’s got momentary switches… should work a treat!
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Thank you guys for your help! Today I’ll meet the seller and probably I’ll buy the FC300 . It is new and half of the price. And after I’ll bind my mind to learn it 
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Oooh 1/2 price is a win for sure.
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Worth a try. 
The great thing about the Helix is that you can program in each patch what the stomp switches send on MIDI. E.g. I have two set for MMC start and stop (with the LED rings of the switches set green and red respectively, and the “scribble strips” appropriately labelled) and one sending a CC toggle to select a song state in Cantabile that unmutes a media player with my singer’s vocals on, so I can practice and have the vocals as well as the live backing track when she is not about.
You can also program commands to send when you select patches, which I use to send patch changes to a companion Roland GR55. I have a strat fitted with a GK3 as Line6 no longer make left handed Variaxes (shame on them!) and the GR55 acoustic guitar modelling is better than my Variax 500 ( and the strat is nicer to play!).
So very flexible foot pedal as well as sounding great!
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Bargain. If for some reason you don’t buy. I’d potentially be interested in it as a spare!
Hi everyone! I bought that Roland fc300, brand new with hard case and power adapter. If somebody has some writen tutorial for this unit, please send it to me. I’ll start with the user manual first, and I will see how much it will help. The unit looks very durable and strong made.
They are well built and bomb proof. You will be pleased with yours, especially at half price for a new unit AND a hard case!
I have not written a tutorial. The best advice I can give is read the manual carefully and decide which mode you are going to operate in. I use mine in Patch Mode as that gives the most flexibility for me. I have a patch for each song, so the selection switches are patch selection switches. That gives you EXP1 and EXP2 pedals and CTRL1 and CTRL2 switches available for setting up as you need for a song. Note you can assign multiple CCs to these, brilliant when controlling different kit from the same pedal if they have different MIDI channels and ranges.
I also have 3 external switches and another expression pedal.
The trick is to try and keep things consistent across songs. E.g. I always use EXP 3 (EXT) for organ swell, EXP1 for general volume fades/volume control and EXP2 for Leslie speed. CTRL3 (EXT) is a song start (for Cantabile) in case the drummer misses his cue(!!!), CTRL4 (EXT) is an advance for our DMX lights for when I need to control them manually (instead of via MIDI cues in Cantabile in the syng, and CTR5 (EXT) is for our Haze machine for when I want to smoke the stage out a bit. There may be some changes for songs where the setup needs to. I keep the internal CTRL1 and 2 free for song specific features, e.g triggering a sequence or playing a (single) bass note.
Hopefully that gives you an idea. The best thing to do is just get in there and program it!
With foot controllers like the FC300 or the Behringer FCB 1010, my recommendation would be to simplify your setup by only using one bank of switches configured either as notes (note-on, note-off) or as controllers (127 on pressed, 0 on released) and leave all the logic to Cantabile via bindings - essentially “dumb down” the pedal board to sending simple MIDI messages.
If you need to control external devices, you can do that via Cantabile as well - even encapsulated in racks, so that you can e.g. control DMX light presets via rack states.
This way, you can manage ALL settings for a song in Cantabile - no need to synchronize two sets of settings, one in your pedalboard and one in Cantabile. And setting up tricky stuff is far easier in Cantabile than on a pedalboard - especially if there isn’t a software editor for it…
Cheers,
Torsten
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Yes, that is good advice if you are starting from scratch with both a pedal board and Cantabile. I started out with the FC300 only (and my synths), so did not have something like Cantabile to act as a processor. Mind you, that also depends if you are routing all MIDI in and out of Cantabile so it can process it. At present Cantabile is the last item in my MIDI chain. I will be redoing my gig setup when I get a new keyboard by the end of July (hopefully), and will probably re do it so that Cantabile is a hub for MIDI data which really opens up that possibility.
I definitely agreen with @Torsten on this. It also means if you ever find yourself in some exotic location doing a gig and your foot controller board fails, or you couldn’t fit it on the plane, you can probably use any old similar device borrowed from someone, because all the clever logic is in Cantabile.
Neil
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Hi everyone!
I am a raw beginner in midi programing. I would like to change the songs, and the virtual instruments in a song with the roland fc300(I have cantabile Solo)…some kind of bank and presets control, switch, change. Right now I am using kawai vpc1 as a keyboard connected via USB to the pc, and the roland fc300 connected to the vpc1 through 5 pin midi cable. In the standard mode the first 5 pedals are changing the touch curves on the kawai. How can I disable this? I tried to change the midi channel on fc300 but did not work. Maybe I have to connect fc300 through a midi-usb adapter…So, if somebody has time to help me, I’ll be grateful . Thank you!
Hi. I can help you on the FC300 side, but we need to understand how it is set up and now you wish to use it, so we will need to work through that, so lets look at getting it to switch patches on your Kawai first, before moving onto the Kawai controlling Cantabile.
At present it looks like you have FC300–>Kawai–>PC&Cantabile signal path. Correct?
This is similar to how I use Cantabile in my setup, and it works. I will be moving at some point to having a “hub and spoke” arrangement where Cantabile becomes the hub and everything connects via it, but I would suggest for simplicity we stick with what you have to get you going. If you only have the FC300 the Kawai and Cantabile, then there is no need to complicate it.
The key question to get thinking about this is what MODE are you going to operate the FC300 in?
You have four mode options
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STANDARD
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COMMAND
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SYSEX
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PATCH
I would recommend PATCH mode as I think this gives you the most flexibility in a keyboard rig.
Yes, this is correct. I read the fc300 user manual a few times and the Patch mode, mentioned by you too is the one that I would like to set it up. Mainly I would like to create sound banks(songs or setlists ) with different vst’s and to be able to change them with the fc300. Till this year I used a Kurzweil Artis keyboard, using only the onboard sounds, no laptop, no controller, no virtual instruments and the programing was quite easy on it. So now i am looking for to set up my new things, vpc 1, laptop, NI komplete11, fc300 as a keyboard with onboard sounds with categories, banks, multies, layers, splits and so on, everything controlled by fc300. I did the shifting from kurzweil to the actual setup because the quality and the tweak possibilities of the virtual instruments are much better and somehow endless. So, thank you for helping me.
OK, here we go…
I can’t find much info on the VPC1, but from the diagram on Features - Kawai VPC - A virtual piano controller from a real piano company. it looks like MIDI IN is routed to USB MIDI OUT. So it looks like if you have the FC300 MIDI OUT connected to the KAWAI VPC1 MIDI IN then any MIDI data from the FC300 should get to Cantabile. I am also assuming that you have all the MIDI and Audio ports setup in Cantabile ready to go. (Check Brad’s guides if you need help in doing this).
It looks like the VPC1 has no concept of patches itself, so I am assuming that the FC300 will need to control Cantabile directly and the VPC1 is a route to getting the FC300 data there. I am also assuming that you want the FC300 to select Songs in a Cantabile setlist in any order, which is similar to how I work.
First, the FC300
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Select PATCH Mode
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Select the Patch you wish to edit
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Press Parameter Right (>)
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The FC300 will show PATCH: ON MIDI which is the set of MIDI commands sent when a patch is selected
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Press the WRITE button.
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The FC300 will show EDIT MIDI
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Press the WRITE button again.
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Press Parameter Right (>) followed by Value UP
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This will add a program change (PC) command. Use the Parameter to navigate to the CH# field to set the MIDI channel from 1 to 16 or TX to use the MIDI channel set in the global parameters, and navigate to PC# field to set the Patch Change number that you wish the FC300 to send.
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Press the EXIT button to get back to the top level menu
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Press and hold the Cursor Right button and repeatedly press the Cursor Left Button to navigate quickly to the Patch Name. Holding one cursor button whilst pressing the other allows you to quickly skip over the controllers to get to the controller that you wish to edit (otherwise you step through all the parameters for all controllers).
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Use the Parameter, Value and INC and DEC keys to set the patch name you wish the patch to be known by.
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Press the EXIT button once to get back to the top level of the Patch.
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Press the WRITE button once, here you have the chance to change the patch number you are saving to. Leave as is unless you really want to change it
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Press the WRITE button again. You will get an “Are you Sure” type prompt. So press WRITE again to confirm the write. You patch should now be stored.
Do the same for as many patches as you need for sending PC values to Cantabile. You can of course program the dual expression pedals and CTRL1 and CTR2 pedals to do anything you need.
What you need to do then is to link the patch changes sent by the FC300 to Cantabile songs
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In Cantabile, click the VIEW menu and select Background Rack (now renamed Global Rack in later versions?).
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Click the Bindings tab
- Click the Add Binding button at the bottom of the screen
- Click the (Learn) button
- Cantabile is now waiting for some MIDI data
- Now press the Patch button on the FC300 that you programmed. Cantabile will give you a number of options
- Select the second option, which specifically selects the Program Change 1 that I programmed on Channel 1. Unless you end up with more than 128 songs, you don’t need to worry about banked program changes. If you will have more than 128 then we will need to program Bank Select MSB and LSB CCs in the FC300.
- At this point you will have a binding on Program Change 1 from the FC300 that is not doing anything. So set up as shown below for the first song in you set list.
Repeat as required…
Hope that helps.
Phew!
So, yes, programming the FC300 is a little fiddly, but well worth it for the power that it has, and it is easy to bind Cantabile songs to FC300 program changes (or indeed any other data it generates.
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Hey Derek,
Thanks for the tutorial!
Dave
Glad it worked for you. Have fun with exploring the rest of the FC300! It is a very powerful controller.
I[quote=“Derek, post:25, topic:1703”]
Glad it worked for you
[/quote]
I think it will work for everyone who will try it
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