Behringer FCB1010

Sturdy, does the job, worth it.

I use it to control a loopstation hands-free. Assigning midi Cc is not intuitive, but you'll find enough tutorials to solve that in 15 minutes. I don't see any other device to do that cheaper.

Excellent

Most probably the best midi controller on the market for it's price. Very good heavy duty construction with quite a lot of adjustment settings. A bit tricky on it's setup but when you figure it out everything runs smoothly. There are a lot of videos on youtube for setting this up so it won't be a problem!

Perfect only if you hack it

I have now set up my FCB1010 in the way I envisioned, and it took quite a lot of work, but now I'm very satisfied with it. Out of the box, it works as expected, but configuring it is unintuitive and laborsome, and you don't have that much flexibility for what the buttons can do. I ended up ordering a third-party non-official firmware which fixes the "software" part of this product, and with that I can now program the MIDI functions in a programming language. This was the definitive solution, and now my setup is very flexible, with features like "trigger" mode for the preset buttons, or "sustain", which as far as I understand are impossible with the official firmware. Regarding the hardware itself, I have two minor complaints: (1) in a silent room, you can hear a hum from the FCB1010 whenever it is turned on, (2) there seems to be some mild "glue" on the expression pedals such that you can feel some stickiness when the pedal is on the extreme bottom or the extreme top. All in all, not a perfect device, but definitely has opened a whole world of possibilities when performing live and when you're hands are busy with a musical instrument.

Good value for money

Good and reasonably robust MIDI pedal board. It has been around for about twenty years now, and shows it's age in that it uses five pin DIN connectors, and needs it's own power chord. Instead of using MIDI USB, and power over USB. Out of the box, if you want to program MIDI settings you have to use the built in interface, using the pedals and a numerical display and some status leds, which can seem a little clunky. The programming interface is sometimes nicknamed "The River Dance". It's actually not that bad, once you get the logic behind the interface. To make it an even better deal there are at least three different FCB1010 MIDI editor programs for Windows and Mac, plus one for iPad, that I know of. That makes it way easier, and also lets you save different setups for different uses. There is also a MAX4Live device for Ableton Live that does the assignment directly in Live, but translating the MIDI signals from the factory setup to the MIDI functions and values Live needs. That one works like a charm too. I'm really satisfied and would definitely buy it again.

the one

And only FCB, the legend. Even in it's stock form, it is a quite capable controller. Wish changing midi channels was an easier endeavor so I could integrate it in my synth setup.

not suitable for my setup

I wanted to control all my hardware synths and sequencers. But this unit does not have the ability to control more than one midi channel at one time. At least there is not any information on the internet about how to setup the unit for this usage.

Excellent (yet complex) controller

I got this to be able to change some plugin presets on the fly and after (a lot) of debugging and learning (I am new to MIDI) I was able to correctly configure the MIDI messages I wanted to send and properly tell the plugins what to do with them. It gets the job done, and the price is accessible.

There is no limitation on what you can do with this, basically you can configure each button (and the expression pedals) to send any MIDI message you want. I could change presets, configure amp settings, Volume, and many other effects just as I wanted. You have a lot of freedom when creating your own setup.

But getting started with it is pretty hard to do, since the only interface you have with it is a 2-digit 7 segment digital display. Luckily, there is a pretty big community online that can help a lot.

Powerful, but finnicky

Firstly, as many other reviewers have likely highlighted, it's built like a f**king tank. The chassis is nigh on invincible. The only weak spot in the construction is both of the expression pedals. Made of a very brittle feeling plastic that I think might not have great survivability.

The expression pedals are really holding the brunt of my irks with this device. They never quite seem to consistently return to max or min positions and they are very much NOT big fans of being reprogrammed to send a different CC signal than 27/28 in my experience. Now this could be user error as I still haven't gotten fully to reigns with the programming interface.

Overall, good tool with a long and possibly frustrating learning curve.

ALLTOGETHER NICE!

i bought it for my rc505mkii looper; after installing the custom chip everything works fine.

Great

Bought for multiple uses, and it works as required

Easy to use and program

Great bit of kit. Does what you expect it to do