Rollicking Good Tunes

This is an album I made a couple years ago almost entirely with the Yamaha FB-01.

Click here to have a listen (via Bandcamp).

Yamaha FB-01 Demo

Yamaha FL-10MII Demo

Yamaha FL-10M II Review

just got this...

Gotta say, didn't really expect too much from this pedal. I have an old MIJ Arion flanger and it's neat enough but kind of one dimensional. I saw this pedal on eBay for $15 and just bought it out of impulse. I've always thought these Yamaha pedals looked cool. well, what do you know, this is a really great pedal. The shit thing about most modulation type pedals is that when you step on them your guitar goes all thin and reedy. This is not like that; it has a really deep lush modulation. It's made me reconsider Flanger pedals entirely. It's easy to get a great sounding chorus sound out of it as well as crazy-go-nuts siren noises. Tweaking the feedback knob adds harmonic overtones to the sound allowing you to get some weird sounds from steel drum sounding tones to almost organ sounding tones. The noisemaking possibilities with this pedal are really great; you can get all kind of dying whale noises and crap by combining it with delay and twiddling the knobs. You can add a hefty deal of clang to your guitar by putting it before your distortion.

That graemy fellow did an demo showing some more normal uses for it. It's a pretty good demo but doesn't really show the sonic mayhem this thing is capable of.

I had pretty much written off things like phasers and flangers as sort of cheesy 'sound effect' pedals but this is a much more useful pedal than that. I guess it goes to show that there are a lot of the modulation pedals out there that aren't very good. You have to really get a good one to get an idea of the functionality of these types of pedals.

FB-01 Patches

I've seen a bit of discussion around the web of how to edit patches on the Yamaha FB-01 but not much about the large amount of patches that are already out there. There are many excellent patches that have been around for years (in many cases decades). In my opinion, you'd be hard pressed to come up with some better sounds than many of these.

To upload these to your FB-01 all you need is a simple MIDI SysEx program. For Mac OSX I recommend SysEx Librarian. It makes sending and receiving MIDI SysEx data extremely easy.

So without further ado, I give you all the FB-01 patches (that I am aware of).

DX21 Patches for FB01.zip - First off, this patch collection contains all the DX-21 patches converted for use with FB-01. Many of them are a good deal better than the factory standard patches for the FB-01. I also included a couple DX-100 patches (the few that aren't on the DX-21 and actually worth mentioning), including the original "WildWar" patch.

Tims FB01 Patches.zip - Next we have these really cool patches from Tim's Atari MIDI World. Some very polished and big sounding lead patches and some warbley almost Boards of Canada style analog sounds here.

FB01 Bobby Clark.zip - Next are these very cool patches that have been around for years. Originally created for the DX-21 by Bobby Clark, I have converted them to work with the FB-01. Again, a lot of great lead sounds and some really cool effects type patches.

FB01 Patch Archive.zip - And lastly this massive patch archive of well over 3000 individual patches. Naturally there's a good amount of mediocre material to sift through but there are some gems hidden away. It's broken into three different collections;

• fb01a_0 - this is the largest of them. A lot of heavy techno sounds, maybe an excessive amount actually. But the FB-01 is kind of lacking in that department so they can be useful. There a few more cool things on here, some absolutely killer Hammond B3 patches.
• 1-20 - a decent sized set, these are some more that I converted from DX-21 user patches.
• FB01 - the best of the bunch. I especially like the "ether" and "synvox" patches. I couldn't get the "plucked" and "strings" files to work though.

A note on how I converted the DX-21 patches; I've used an old AtariST program by Martin Tarenskeen that does the necessary formatting of the files as well as adjust the operator levels to roughly the correct scale for the FB-01.

Yamaha 4OP Comparison

Here's a quick comparison of the classic Yamaha 4 operator FM synths. Created as inexpensive alternatives to the 6 OP DX7, when handled with care these synths are capable of some great sounds. First off, naturally, they all have four operators; one being the carrier frequency and the other three the modulating frequencies. Another thing is they all seem to have 8 note polyphony. So looking around a bit, the consensus on the difference in sound between these comes down to; multitimbrality or how many instruments it can play at once, the waveshape of the operators and the bit depth of the digital to analog converter (DAC).

DX-21

Multitimbral: Mono

Waveshape: Sine

DAC Bit Depth: 10 bit

DX-27 / DX-100

Multitimbral: Mono

Waveshape: Sine

DAC Bit Depth: 10 bit

FB-01

Multitimbral: 8 part

Waveshape: Sine and Noise

DAC Bit Depth: 10 bit

TX81Z / DX-11

Multitimbral: 8 part

Waveshape: 8 shapes

DAC Bit Depth: 12 bit

TQ-5

Multitimbral: 8 part

Waveshape: 8 shapes

DAC Bit Depth: 12 bit

So looking at this as a timeline we can see some changes occurred with the FB-01 with the addition of 8 part multitimbrality and the ability to set one of the operators as a noise generator. Then the TX81Z added the ability to change the waveshape outright. The other important thing folks seem to point out on this is the 12 bit DAC on the TX81Z. You might wonder how the bit depth at the input side of the DAC could really make any difference, and honestly I'm not so sure myself, but people claim that it gives the signal more breathing room resulting in a fuller sound. The 10 bit DACs seem to result in a more lo-fi gritty sound (and a really good bass sound). There are camps that swear by either side so it's definitely a personal preference thing.

Addendum: So the FB-01 actually is unique in the way it handles programming the voices. The volume of the operators is controlled on a 0 - 127 scale, all the other 4OP synths use a 0 - 99 scale. I think this is the main reason the stock voices are not up to par with the rest of the Yamaha 4OP synths. Basically the engineers at Yamaha had to relearn the whole system to program the voices; probably not worth it for a product that was supposed to be the cheapest of their synth range. So they probably pushed it through quickly to get something on the market. There are a handful of decent patches on there but most people prefer to program their own for this unit.

For an extremely in depth analysis, check this guy's page: http://www.angelfire.com/in2/yala/2fmsynth.htm

He refers to the FB-01 range as the "CX". I assume what he actually means is the "SFG-01 / SFG-05" which were the sound modules on the CX5M computer. I intend to follow this post up with a more in depth post on the FB-01 explaining the relationship of these units.