Re: Fa06 questions
@Brad and Speeder:
I've not used that keyboard but would recommend that if you have the ability to send it back and get your money back if nothing happens in a sirtain amount of days that you do so. If things aren't working as they're meant to, I always try to send stuff back to get a refund.
While this is good advice, I highly doubt this is an issue of things not working as expected. I will, however, go off topic for a second and say that the FA is notorious for having issues with the joystick. I've heard this can be the case with other Roland products, as a friend of mine had an old Roland keyboard which had the same issue my FA does. With mine, and a few other people I've spoken to, the pitch bending doesn't go down all the way, and sometimes resets to a point slightly higher than normal, leaving everything sharp. Nothing seems physically wrong with the j oystick when moving or feeling it, but the pitch bend messages it sends are broken (I've checked in a sequencer). My best guess is that something is screwed up internally and that it would need replacing. I've read about some DIY users trying to fix it and having little success, so if it happens you'd likely need to get it serviced. Mine started doing it after a few months, others have had more luck, and many others have never had the issue in the 5 years they've had their units. For the record I've had Yamaha keyboards, some lasting 20 years, and have not heard a single complaint from myself or others about parts failing with normal use. I do think their keys wear out a lot faster than Roland's. They still work but are not as pleasant to play. So you can't have your cake and eat it too I suppose. All you can do is keep an eye on your unit. Maybe this joystick issue is a thing of the past, but I just wanted to throw this out there because I don 9;t really know how prevalent it still is.
Now to answer Speeder's questions.
Firstly, when trying to control the keyboard via qws, I get FA06 ctrl, FA06 daw ctrl, and FA06. no matter what port I use, the sound I get sounds doubled strangely.
In QWS, go into options menu, then ports. In there, you will see a midi devices list. Find the midi in devices option, which you should be focused on when you enter the dialog. Down arrow to the FA06 ctrl and FA06 daw ctrl ports. Tab to the "use this port" check box and uncheck it. You have to do this to both ports individually. Leave the plain FA06 port alone; that is the one you need open. Then go back to the midi devices list, and find the midi out devices section which should contain the same three FA06 ports as the midi in section did. The two above ports I mentioned have to be disabled in outputs too, the plane FA06 port should also be left alone. Now hit OK, and when you create a track, the FA06 port should be the only port in the list and it shouldn't produce any doubled sounds when you play midi files. You will, however, need to press the daw mode button on the FA06 to turn its local sound off, otherwise the keyboard will produce doubled sounds when you play it in a sequencer. One copy will be its own sound and the other will be triggered by the sequencer. It's been a long time since I've used the FA, but Nocturnus's description should help you find the Daw mode button. The button you are looking for is on the left side, and it is pretty separate from the others. When you press it, it will disable the keyboard's internal sound. If it's not hooked up to a sequencer you won't hear anything. If it is, it will play sounds as instructed by QWS, and you won't have doubling effects.
Also, reaper won't use the in fa06 an d out fa06 audio devices with wasapi.
I've had bad experiences with Wsapi on my native sound card, probably because I don't know what I'm doing. Lol. I don't know how well the FA works with it. If it doesn't work, you can use Wave Out with a low buffer length, which is your next best option. I have my Wave OUt buffers on 48 and 32 respectively, and sometimes I can go a bit lower.
The FA also has an Asio driver which would've come with the midi driver you installed. I'm not sure if you've looked into it. It doesn't seem to offer any inputs, but you can play vsts and other things through its outputs. The performance is pretty good, I've gotten the latency down to a pretty low level. I've found this really useful for midi sequencing.
Adding insult to the injury of not knowing how to use the thing, it seems to not be giving me access to all the patches in a given category, I only get about the first 6 patches in acoustic basses. Can someone please give me some pointers?
When you first boot up the FA, you only get a subset of the sounds available to you from the front panel. There is something in the menus that lets you scroll through all sounds, but I can't remember how to get there. Not to mention, the FA's operating system was recently updated, and if this unit is new, you probably got the update right off. If your unit comes up with a piano when you boot it up, it most likely got the update. If it has a strange tinkly pad sound when you boot it up, then you haven't updated. You can update it if you want, but we won't go into that now, and I haven't updated mine yet since I rarely use it. The good news is that if you use a sequencer like QWS, you don't have to mess with the menus, as a sequencer can access all the patches on the unit. The menu thing is only for browsing patches on the
unit itself, it does not indicate which patches you can use on a sequencer. There is an instrument list available for the FA on the QWS web site, however it's kind of a pain since if you want to use expansions, you have to merge the expansion list with the FA list to get access to all the sounds. I've made a consolidated FA instrument list that covers all the expansions besidesEXP11 (that only came out recently and I haven't updated my list). Because the list is so huge, it does take a while to load, but it's pretty convenient for browsing purposes, and I've also added hotkeys like less-than (<) to browse between stock FA categories, and greater-than (>) to browse expansions.
Let me know if any of this information is helpful!
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