Behringer FCB1010 & Amplitube – Program Changes

I said I’d mention something about Amplitube’s program change feature, so here it is. On the surface, this is a fairly simple process, with one annoying quirk which left unnoticed may drive you slowly insane. In my current setup, I now have the 5 non-stompbox pedals on the FCB1010’s bank each set to open a specific preset within Amplitube. To do this simply give each of the non-stompbox pedals it’s own Program Change value in the FCB1010’s preset setup (make sure it’s not set to send sysex PCs too!), then open up the preset in Amplitube, hit the MIDI button, and go to ‘preset’ as opposed to ‘global’. Here at the bottom is a small box where you can edit a Program Change value. Enter the same value as your pedal is sending out, exit MIDI setup, and save the preset (‘preset’ values need to be saved as opposed to global mapping which saves automatically, otherwise it’ll wipe the info when you switch presets). Now, if you move to another random preset in Amplitube and hit the corresponding FCB1010 pedal, it should switch to your selected preset.

..But it doesn’t.

The reason for this, as I eventually found out, is that whereas Amplitube has available program change values ranging from 0-127, the FCB1010 outputs values from 1-128. So basically, program change #0 in amplitube will actually respond to program change #1 on the FCB1010. Essentially, this means you need to set your program change values in Amplitube to one less than the setting on the FCB. Why this is implemented in this way is anyone’s guess, but once you’ve got your head round that, it should work brilliantly.

Beyond this, there’s a few other functions worth mentioning – Firstly, it’s probably a good idea to turn OFF program change messages from the stompbox buttons, as in this case if you hit a pedal to turn off a stompbox it could still potentially send a program change which Amplitube could respond to and switch presets instead.. probably not what you’d want it to do. Another feature is that each of the normal FCB pedals used to send program change information can also control the ON/OFF state of any (or all) of the 5 stompboxes. So, for example if you typically want to switch to a clean preset with the delay pedal turned on, you can use the preset to also make sure the stompbox assigned to the delay pedal turns on at the same time. This is done in the preset settings on the FCB1010 (you can find more details on Stompbox Setup in the UnO manual, under the “Preset Configuration” section).

Other than that, I think I will be creating some videos to help people step-by-step through the process of setting this up, as I still feel it must be very confusing for your average guitarist. Stay tuned for that!