THE ULTIMATE(?) FB-01 PATCH COLLECTION Version 0.01. (Upgrades? Gimme a break!) This descriptive text brought to you by Steve Winter, R. Shrier and the good folks at Living Skill Media and Textfiles'R'Us. ("If you can almost stand to read it, we probably wrote it.") DISCLAIMER: Well, it's "Steve the copycat" time again! First it was the plastic-shaft whip-hammer, conceived in Grade 6 but never developed...some fellow technogeek is probably retiring soon off of my idea. Then it was fruit-flavored salad dressing. I KNOW Kraft read my letters! More recently, it was "Shine", a terrific kick-ass popper I'd been sitting on for nearly 18 months and was _that_ close to scoring financial backing for a 12" '45 when REM released the SAME DAMN SONG as "Stand"! (No matter that Bryan Adams ripped Tom Petty's "Refugee" chord-for-chord on "Run to Me" and escaped a lawsuit; I'm not Bryan Adams and I'm much smaller than Peter Buck.) Now Harry Wootan does it to me! If I had uploaded this pig when I'd planned to, I'd have beaten him by two days! I SWEAR it! Well, at least I'm getting closer time-wise to the hundredth- monkey thang. Anyways, there's much more here, and, I think, some better patches too. I can say that it was planned this way from the start, but you wouldn't believe that either. But hats off to H.WOOTAN anyways, without whom I wouldn't be possible. CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE DEPT. What Harry modestly (absent-mindedly? I mean, he _is_ a musician...) failed to mention in the textfile in FB01.ARC is that he is author of two purty fair ST FB-01 editor/librarians to be found in this very roundtable, and author of STMIDIEX, which is, cryptically enough, the long-awaited and sorely-needed MIDIEX sysex protocol for ST. Support this man with your shareware contributions...he has a serious toy habit. (So do I, which is why I confess that I haven't...yet!) YOU DON'T KNOW HOW LUCKY YOU ARE DEPT. *****BEWARE! IN FUTURE TEXTFILES FROM LIVING SKILL THIS SPACE WILL BE USED FOR 9gasp9 ... ****ADVERTISING!**** Yes, we've got some unique new services of interest to home recordists and demo-gogues and you'd bloody well better believe that STUDTRIX.ARC, our next international posting, will have plenty to say about it. (STUDTRIX? Naaa...it's GOT to be music- related, doesn't it?) TECH SPECS The patch banks in this ARC were dumped from the Yamaha CX5-M Music Computer to the FB-01, transferred to an Atari ST, stored to MIDIEX files using ST MIDIEX and ARCed using ST ARC v. 5.21, and this textfile was allegedly saved in vanilla ASCII 65- column format. Hopefully this will make this ARC fully compatible with all computers which use ARC compression and have a MIDIEX sysex storage utility. And I'm sure I'll hear about it if it's not. (ST owners: look for a file, either locally or on your favorite international net, called STMIDIEX.ARC or MIDISYSX.ARC; MS-DOS users: your file is called MIDIEX.ARC or .ZIP; others: here's hoping MIDIEX comes to a CPU near U some time soon!) BAD NEWS Some of these patch banks do not seem to want to transfer between computer types, while others work fine. Rather than take a chance on excluding a bank someone might find useful, all banks in our studio library were kept intact in this ARC. Be aware that some banks may report DUMP ERROR!!!! on your FB-01. Don't worry...you won't lose patches 49 to 96 in Bank 1 if it happens. In addition, these are single-bank loads, as MIDIEX does not seem to want to dump all 96 available user presets to Bank 1. If you want to build a 96-patch user bank, you'll have to transfer the patches, one by tedious one, from no.'s 1-48 to 49-96 before loading in the second bank. TO USE THESE PATCHES: To make maximum use of these patches, dump them into your FB-01 using MIDIEX, back into your favorite patch-editing program and save the banks again as editor-compatible data files. I know, it's time-consuming, but it's the easiest way to have these patches in the format you'll probably use them most. You can rename the files to anything you like, as it appears MIDIEX doesn't care what kind of filename it loads. ABOUT THE PATCHES The DXabc.xyz patch banks are all direct ports of factory patch loads from the DX-100, 21 and 27 originally converted to CX-5M format. (The CX-5M shares a virtually identical voice architecture to the FB-01, so if you know anyone with a CX-5M and can score one of the rare FB-01 Editor cartridges for it, you can easily port CX-5M banks into your FB.) These banks are, to the best of my knowledge, not being copyright-enforced by Yamaha, although Yamaha retains the copyright on them. They were obtained at no cost from a Yamaha dealer who had been cleared to share them with a CX-5M users' group. Some have been modified to be velocity-sensitive, but as the original code was developed by Yamaha, I cannot take credit for developing them, nor can I make any statement regarding their pay-for-PD status. One bank was ported from 4-operator DX-7 or TX-7 user patches; I make no claim to authorship of these patches either. The CX5Mabc.xyz banks were either tweaked from the DX tones or built from scratch on the Yamaha CX-5M music computer and loaded into the FB-01 using the FB-01 Editor cartridge. Having used and tested a large collection of FB-01 patches (at least 1,500), I think you'll find these banks provide the optimum in tweaking of the factory preset sounds as well as the most useful basic collection of working patches for the FB-01. They are the product of literally dozens of hours of work, perhaps hundreds. Who uses a stopwatch when they're messing around anyway? WHO'S AFRAID OF A BIG, BAD WOOF (or HINTS AND TRICKS FOR FB- 01/CX-5M HACKERS) Due to the nature of the FB-01 itself, some of these patches tend to demand a very precise touch on the keyboard. MIDI compression via the JL Cooper MX-8 or a sequencer with compression (e.g. Creator/Notator) is recommended to smooth out your tracks. Your most common complaint in regards to most patches will be that the "amplitude envelope" is not quite right; the patch may need more or less attack, sustain or release. When editing patches, you can usually assume that Operator 4 can be used as an ADSR amplitude envelope that behaves in the same manner as a VCA on an analog or D/A hybrid synth. The exception is in the case of "stacked" 4-op sounds such as wind instruments and organs, where two pairs of side-by-side operators are used for separate voicings. In that case, Operator 2 will be the "VCA" for "voice 1" and Operator 4 will be the "VCA" for "voice 2". Amateur FM hackers, have no fear! Messing with Operator 4's level should have little overall effect on the actual sound of *most* patches. It should only adjust the total volume. And messing with the Operator 4 envelope shouldn't affect *most* patches either, except to adjust the attack/decay/sustain/release characteristics of the whole sound. My proudest achievement with these banks, aside from the development of some KILLER bass patches that I'm still trying to port to my DX-7, is the emulation of analog tones (VCA/VCF/resonance) using FM architecture. Most of the analog- type tones are named ANA* or ANAL* (!) or use names derived from names of analog-type synths, and I STRONGLY suggest you try tweaking these patches to see if you can't get virtually all the "analog" sounds you need out of the FB-01 before deciding to purchase a cheap analog synth to do the job! I've found personally that the ideal synth setup doesn't require analog at all; virtually everything you need (except some cross-modulation patches and blippy-bleepy resonant LFO wonks) can be squeezed from 4-op DX, PCM/digital waveform synthesis, and Casio CZ synthesis (CZ-1000/101's are dirt cheap these days and frequently indispensible! And not only that, but they have by far the greatest PD/share editor/generator/librarian support of any single synth.). Another important tip for beginner/intermediate 4-op hackers: The reason I still use the FB-01 in a professional setting has a lot to do with a very advanced velocity feature (at least for the time the FB-01 was first marketed): velocity-sensitive attack! This is especially useful in funk and kick-ass rock, where you want nice, swelling strings and brass in one part of a song and sharp stabs in other parts from the same patch, you need this on the sequence itself, and you know it's going to be extra work to mess with the faders when tracking or mixing. Varying the velocity attack level in a modulating operator (the one that hangs off the side of the chain[!?]) will allow you to use velocity to control the how fast the "filter sweep" rises as well as how sharply. And in case no one has told you yet, you can double the size of your current collection of USABLE patches simply by changing the algorithm of the sound! Try all eight algorithms on all your patches, and I think you'll discover how easy it is to develop new patches for the FB-01 that actually sound good! (You might also be surprised at how often the Yamaha factory programmers got away with doing just that when writing presets for the FB-01!) This trick actually works for ALL FM synths, including the Korgs (although you only have the two algorithms to play with) and the six-op DX-7's (although you don't usually get more than one or two other useful sounds), but as a DX-7 owner with 4,000 patches for that pig, I haven't needed to try it on anything but my FB-01. Here's hoping these tips and tricks help you get the most out of what is still, despite its ridiculously-low resale value, a highly useful and, when used properly, a professional-quality tone generator. If you found these simple tricks useful, please be sure to spread them around to all FB-01/CX-5M owners (the two synths share identical architectures, just like the CZ-101 and CZ-1000). Creating new, useful patches is much easier than it looks, especially if you have experience with analog-type architectures and can see certain parts of the DX voice as equivalent to their analog-type counterparts. There's no reason why anyone should be surprised when you announce "My FB-01 is easier to program than your Alpha-Juno!!" Mind you, there's no reason why you should be bragging about your FB-01 in front of an Alpha-Juno user, either. So there. -------------------------------------- Please address all correspondence, hate mail, etc. to: (In transit. See the next Living Skill/Textfiles'R'Us upload for more complete data. Or the next after that maybe. With the rental market as it is, who knows how long it will take? Who cares? Not you, certainly. In the meantime, address correspondence electronically to da Big Guy, R.SHRIER, on GEnie.) -----------------------------------------------------------------