Hi Folks
Just sharing some recent experiences with the Behringer FCB1010 midi foot controller.
I have to say on paper the unit looks fantastic - very robust build, 10 buttons plus 2 expression pedals. Price is around £/$ 100 or so....
What I have found is the unit uses only 5 pin MIDI in and out which is absolutely fine, but certainly does not make it plug and play. I use a Nectar Panorama for all my keyboard duties and it has to be said this, like many other systems are a bit more user friendly.
Out of the box, the system was not exactly user friendly or intuitive. Reading a few posts around it seems to be you have to become pretty good at multiple steps to program things and honestly this was not intuitive to me. Others may find this easy, but I parked this for a week in frustration! There are a few editors out there from 3rd parties and I can now understand why.
The breakthrough moment for me was finding the UnO chip (thank you Mike) - a firmware upgrade from a third party that helps turn the unit into pretty much a stomp box through any presets that you might want to use
www.fcb1010.uno
This now makes everything rock solid and as easy as I first wanted....I can have 10 presets at the touch of a button which should be enough for most of us.
If you know what to do - certainly this is a great unit - but not exactly user friendly out of the box. The UnO update needs a change of the firmware chip (see enclosed image) this is not more than unscrewing the case and changing a chip over which I found pretty straightforward.
It is a great piece of hardware, just do not expect to be up and running in 5 minutes!
Cheers
DaveP