Choosing a MIDI foot controller

[7G]

Hello to everybody,
I'm ready to buy a MIDI foot controller in the price range of 150-300€...Throughout my search i stepped into 3 units:

1)BEHRINGER FCB 1010(great community)
2)ROLAND FC300(features,flexibility)
3)YAMAHA MFC10(i like that kind of switch pedals)

Any suggestions on these or any other you might think of would be very appreciated...


Thanks

[Timur]

I chose the Roland FC-300 over the Behringer for several reasons. First of all the Behringer uses plastic caps on the side with the unit in the shop being broken at exactly that place, the FC-300 is rock-solid all around. By mistake I already droped something heavy and square-edged on from about 1m mine which resulted in only a minor scuff on the LCD glass and one pedal, but you really have to look for it to notice it.

The Behringer community is in fact vast and great, but in order to fully utilize the Behringer you need to buy an eeprom hack, else its functionality is a bit too restricted for my taste. The FC-300 doesn't need no hacking, it's the most versatile Midi controller I have come to find in that price-range (and maybe overall). It can send anything and that not only as single events but if you need you can send whole chains of events. It can even switch guitar-amps via standard jacks.

One of the other reasons I chose it was that beside the usual digit number display it features a LCD display which displays proper patch-names and plain language menus for settings.

It can run on both batteries and 9V standard Boss/guitar effects power plug and whenever you pull the plug by mistake it will automatically fall back on batteries uninterrupted.

In Sysex mode is like the "native" mode of the Korg Padkontrol. Via Sysex you can control about everything, downto a single pixel of the LCD, every LED and even turn on a tuner display on the LCD (which needs to be fed with external data though, I hacked a software tuner to do that once).

[7G]

I chose the Roland FC-300 over the Behringer for several reasons. First of all the Behringer uses plastic caps on the side with the unit in the shop being broken at exactly that place, the FC-300 is rock-solid all around. By mistake I already droped something heavy and square-edged on from about 1m mine which resulted in only a minor scuff on the LCD glass and one pedal, but you really have to look for it to notice it.

The Behringer community is in fact vast and great, but in order to fully utilize the Behringer you need to buy an eeprom hack, else its functionality is a bit too restricted for my taste. The FC-300 doesn't need no hacking, it's the most versatile Midi controller I have come to find in that price-range (and maybe overall). It can send anything and that not only as single events but if you need you can send whole chains of events. It can even switch guitar-amps via standard jacks.

One of the other reasons I chose it was that beside the usual digit number display it features a LCD display which displays proper patch-names and plain language menus for settings.

It can run on both batteries and 9V standard Boss/guitar effects power plug and whenever you pull the plug by mistake it will automatically fall back on batteries uninterrupted.

In Sysex mode is like the "native" mode of the Korg Padkontrol. Via Sysex you can control about everything, downto a single pixel of the LCD, every LED and even turn on a tuner display on the LCD (which needs to be fed with external data though, I hacked a software tuner to do that once).

Great info Timur,
I had no doubt about the flexibility of FC-300...The only downside i found was that you have to "scroll through all parameters of all pedals until you reach the pedal which setting you want to change" as you wrote in a NI thread...Was that you btw?

[Timur]

Yes that was me but I was partly wrong! It is possible to directly jump from pedal to pedal instead of going through all the parameters of the subsequent pedals first. Unfortunately you cannot just push the pedal you want to edit, but it's good enough for me that way and surely worlds better than trying to program the Behringer which has no LCD at all. On the other hand there are some freeware editors for the Behringer out there. It all depends on what functions you need.

[dj superflat]

i have the yamaha, love it, and it's way easy to add four extra pedals/buttons. so worth considering, though it's a little pricier.

[Noel]

I have the yamaha and mechanically it is very good, and the extra footswitch inputs are very usefull. My main reason for choosing it was size, because the beringer would not fit between the feet of my keyboard stand.

I don't know about the Roland, but for me the biggest problem with the Behringer and the Yamaha is the patch based model of operation. Whats needed is a bank of on off or trigger switches where the lamp on each switch indicates the current state of that switch, but all you can see from the lamps is which switch was pressed last and there is no provision for setting them up as toggle switches. It's OK for clip and scene launching, but in general the programability of these pedal boards could go much deeper.

[Timur]

The Roland offers Toggle switching and you even can set it up to be blinking in off-state instead of turning off so that you can better find them switches in a dark stage situation.

[7G]

The Roland offers Toggle switching and you even set it up to be blinking in off-state instead of turning off so that you can better find them switches in a dark stage situation.

Thank you all for your replies so far...
It looks like Roland has done it again and raised the bar ever further with the FC-300...Looks like it'll be my first Roland gear...

[arkoenig]

i have the yamaha, love it, and it's way easy to add four extra pedals/buttons. so worth considering, though it's a little pricier.

I have heard the claim that the Yamaha has a significant delay between when you press a pedal and when the controller sends its MIDI message. I don't know for sure if this claim is true, but if it is, it would limit the controller's usefulness in some situations.

Perhaps someone who has one of the Yamaha controllers might comment.

[Noel]

I can't say I've noticed any delay with the yamaha, but I've only used it for triggering clips with launch quantise on, so I always press ahead of the beat anyway. But the control pedal seems responsive enough.

[arkoenig]

I can't say I've noticed any delay with the yamaha, but I've only used it for triggering clips with launch quantise on, so I always press ahead of the beat anyway. But the control pedal seems responsive enough.

I think the claim appeared on the Loopers-Delight mailing list, from someone who was using foot pedals for live looping without any quantizatiln.

[dj superflat]

i've notice no delay with the yamaha (i use it for live and/or mobius), and you can set the buttons to toggle (maybe i'm misunderstanding the prior post). you can actually program far more than i expected into the pedal.

[snowtires]

speaking of which, i have an fcb1010 that i want to sell for $75 bucks, if anyone wants it.

[lunabass]

i'm also iooking at foot controllers. the roland looks quite nice but there is a fair price difference between it and the behringer...here in oz anyway

[lunabass]

BEHRINGER FCB 1010 (great community)

which community are you talking about, the unofficial behringer users forum?...