FCB-1010 Footboard Mods & Upgrades

Owen

Probably the only decent bit of kit they've made, the Behringer FCB-1010 is a pretty versatile and well build MIDI footboard. 10 pedals, 2 expression pedals, MIDI in & out, and 2 amp channel switching relays. All metal construction, and will take an unmerciful pounding on the road - I've mine 8 years and its still going strong, but it was starting to look tired, and wasn't doing everything I wanted it to do.

The mods I've done are Phantom Power through the MIDI cable, painting the unit black and removing all branding, recalibration of the expression pedals, and an upgrade to the UnO firmware.

Here's what the standard unit looks like :


It's grand and all that, but the silver finish gets dirty really quickly, the Behringer enormous branding on it is a bit gaudy, and having to run 2 cables one for MIDI and one for power makes stage setups awkward.

So I stripped mine completely, and painted it black, and then lacquered it (Apologies for the crappy photo, taken on a phone in low light).



After that, I fitted the phantom power mod. The unit runs on 9v AC (Not DC). The MIDI port it uses has 5 pins, but only three run to the board to transmit data (Tx, Rx, Gnd), the other two are redundant and are perfect for transmitting power. I built a little separate box which has a midi port on each end, and lives inside my rack. One end goes to my pre-amp/effects, but inside the box, I have a 9v AC power supply which is then connected to the 2 unused pins on the other connector. I run a normal MIDI cable from the board to this connector on the box, meaning I can have a 5 metre cable away from my amp/rack and not have to worry about having a 5 metre kettle lead too.



In case the cable ever breaks (As cables do), I wanted the option to switch back to mains, so I put in a 10A DPDT switch which allows me to swap between the external phantom power, and the units built in mains supply. Its easy enough to find the wires to splice into, there's 2 yellow wires coming from the transformer in the unit, polarity doesn't matter as it's AC voltage. You can see the switch in the photo below.



After that, I installed the UnO firmware chip. It's available online for about 16 euro delivered, and is a plug and play install. It gives you a lot of new features which you'll find on the UnO site, but also gives you some useful features like Stompbox mode, and expression pedal position. Stomp box mode allows you to have the upper 5 pedals as patches, and the lower 5 pedals as individual stomp boxes for each patch too - so it's like having separate distortion/delay/chorus/pitch pedals that you can turn on and off - which is something the normal FCB couldn't handle. The other good feature is that when you move either expression pedal, it shows the value for the position of the pedal in realtime as you move it, which disappears after a few seconds.

Second last step before closing the unit was to recalibrate the expression pedals - there's dozens of guides out there on how to do it, so I'm not going to go into detail on that, but if you're finding them hard to calibrate as I did, remove the optical board under each pedal. Where the red LED is, and the optical sensor on the other side can get bent out of shape. Realign them so they're facing each other exactly just by gently pushing them, and it'll resolve most problems, a good cleaning of the optical sensor never hurts either.

Last step, bolt it all back together, hope for the best. I think overall the debranding works well along with the black paint and makes the unit look as professional as it performs. I'd definitely recommend whatever about painting it, to do the phantom power mod, and the firmware chip if you have one, makes working with the unit much simpler overall.

rcaz

Nice work! Looks and sounds great!

I'm looking to get one of these eventually, so I can control Ableton and Pure Data while playing guitar. What do you use yours for?

Owen

At the moment, just as a remote for the GT-Pro you can see in the background. Makes setting up for gigs very very easy, all I have is 3 wires, power into the rack, MIDI to the footboard, and a speakon from the poweramp in the rack to the cab. All of 2 minutes to be ready for a gig.

rcaz

PaintDoctor wrote: »

At the moment, just as a remote for the GT-Pro you can see in the background. Makes setting up for gigs very very easy, all I have is 3 wires, power into the rack, MIDI to the footboard, and a speakon from the poweramp in the rack to the cab. All of 2 minutes to be ready for a gig.

You forgot signal from your guitar to your rack :pac:

Setting up for gigs easy compared to what? I run ten or so pedals at gigs, depending on the set list, I only have power to my pedal board, signal from my guitar and signal to my amp

Owen

El Pr0n wrote: »

You forgot signal from your guitar to your rack :pac:

The Rack's got wireless in there just in case

El Pr0n wrote: »

Setting up for gigs easy compared to what? I run ten or so pedals at gigs, depending on the set list, I only have power to my pedal board, signal from my guitar and signal to my amp

I used to have individual pedals, and even though I'd sorted out the wiring to make that aspect of it simple, some moron of a child who's parents thought babysitting was keeping it in the pub with them would inevitably come over and twiddle all my settings on the pedals. I'd end up running power, 2 cables, and then spending a good 20 minutes getting all my pedals back the way they should be.

Prior to that, it used to take even longer when I'd the individual pedals and wired them separately instead of having them velcro'd to a board.

fuzztone

That looks so much better black! I just came across this kit for the phantom power mod (http://www.dmvelectronics.com/store/pc/viewPrd.asp?idcategory=3&idproduct=1). Apparently this board will auto sense the phantom power and line power and switch to the phantom supply whenever it is present. No extra switch!

Owen

Expensive though! Ouch! I'd prefer to flick my switch, but it is really elegant. Did you see the add on modules the makers of the UnO do? They're incredible, but absolutely mental money.

fuzztone

The kit is expensive but since I dont have a clue where to get bridge rectifiers or female midi connectors over here I'll pay for the convenience of a kit

I just checked out that Little Giant module......wow! Pricey enough but I'm tempted to go for it.

slavedave

Veeerrrrryyy nice! Love the look of it. Now you have got me thinking of modding mine - had looked at the UNO chip before and using the midi cable for power supply but then used it less and less and never got around to it.
Did you use auto paint and lacquer? What is the chip resistance like so far?
Some of the hammered finishes would look very cool - esp the black and red ones. Pretty tough paint too. Did you clean the surface with alcohol / solvent pre- application?

Owen

Used an etch primer, then standard car paint and lacquer. I scuffed surface with 400 grit paper, removed the major chips that were on it with 120 paper, and gave everything a wipe down anti-sil paint prep solution. Chip resistance seems fine, there's no cars throwing stones at it yet