Amplitube 3 and the Behringer FCB1010

I’d been having a bit of a mess on with these two – whereas Guitar Rig seemed to instantly understand my new Behringer foot pedal’s MIDI commands as program changes, Amplitube appears to be using CC’s. Hence I’m currently up at nearly 5am, popping my results thus far onto my blog;
Firstly, there wasn’t a huge wealth of information immediately available on Amplitube and the Behringer in conjunction. Probably the most helpful chap was on the following video showing the way he’s set it up with X-Gear –

Thankfully Amplitube 3.7 no longer requires X-Gear, so I could simply control it from within the main program. However, one desire with this was to run it as a VST/RTAS within a DAW. This presented some other problems as I was having trouble getting MIDI into the program at all in plugin mode.

The answer was deceptively simple, and maybe obvious to some – in Cubase at least, you need to set up a MIDI track with the correct input from the pedal and MIDI channel assigned. Providing you already have Amplitube assigned to either an audio track or aux insert, it should appear as a MIDI control option in your MIDI track output setttings.

The other side of things is making sure the FCB1010 is actually sending out CCs at all – by default each pedal only sends out a program change command. This, if you own one, you will soon realise is where the FCB1010 excels and confuses all at once – it takes a good read (or in my case about 5) to fully digest the manual, but basically in short form the FCB1010 can send out 10 MIDI messages at once. That’s 5 program changes, 2 CCs, 2 sets of Expression Data (via the two pedals), and a note on event, if one so wished. Phew!

Anyway, Amplitube uses CCs, and it’s not too hard to activate them on the pedal. You can send 2 seperate CCs with a single hit, although the strange thing about this is that you NEED to use both of these at once in order to activate/deactivate Amplitube’s stomp boxes and effects. This is basically two CCs at the exact same value and channel, but one at 0 velocity, the other at 127. The same appears to apply to setting these CCs as preset up/down buttons (I use presets 9/10 as up/down).

Unfortunately, although this worked relatively well, the Behringer doesn’t appear to work quite properly in a true ‘stompbox’ mode – preset changes, and some effect on/off commands, take 2 hits of the pedal to be effective. Apparently the UNO chip, a custom EEPROM available as a modification for the FCB1010, can fix these issues, so I intend on ordering one of these as soon as possible.

Once I have this up and running exactly as I want, I intend on writing an in-depth tutorial for using this pedal with Amplitube, since not a great deal of data exists on the subject.