PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Using Fantom X8 Midi sounds instead of Coyote Forte or WT

Ken, all this stuff about patch maps and expansion cards is good info and you may need it later but for now I'm suggesting you KISS it and keep everything GM. GM is the industry standard set of instructions for synths that allows you to play back SMF files. The Forte DXi is a GM synth. SMF stands for Standard Midi File. SMF's all use the GM sound bank. No patch maps necessary.
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Most of the time the GM bank is not as good as all the other patches when you compare each instrument but it's very convenient because you don't do squat except put your synth into GM mode. A high end synth like yours has a great sounding GM bank and it could very easily be good enough for you. I have the Roland Sonic Cell and it's the same thing with that. Individual instrument patches are better than the GM bank but it's close enough that I really don't care most of the time. Loading and playing an SMF is a no brainer. Like most of us here, I'm busy with lots of other things and I get lazy sometimes.

I downloaded and skimmed through the manual for the X8. You put it into Performance mode and select the GM Performance bank. Your X8 has a PC Card slot as well as USB. You can pick one of those up and put it into your computer and copy some SMF's onto it. If you don't have any SMF's now then create some with Biab, save it on the card and plug the card into your X8. Biab has a save option for that because Biab uses GM as the default. This is not using Real Tracks, just midi then in the X8 open the song play function and choose Quick Play from the card and hit the Play button on your sequencer control area. Nothing to do, nothing to set up, just hit play and hear what it sounds like. I think you will be blown away.

This is the simple quick way to get started. The more detailed way is to hook up your USB cable (in the manual under USB) and copy a folder full of your songs into the X8 and organize them however you want to. The X8 allows lots of ways to control the playback of SMF's. It's all in the manual under Playing a Song.

Now after reading all this you may be thinking but what about setting up my laptop, running Biab and just use the X8 for sound at a gig? You can do that but why? You're not likely to be changing the order of the playback of the song using Biab live on a gig. Technically you can by using the Conductor feature but you only have two hands and you're busy performing. It's hard to have to look at a laptop screen, tell exactly where you're at and hit one of the number keys that tells Biab to jump or loop a section of the song all the while you're busy singing and playing. Much easier to forget all that and load the files into the X8 ahead of time. The X8 has it's own way of doing the exact same thing as Biab's Conductor. See the Song Playback section of your manual. You control all that right from the X8.

Once you've gotten used to playing SMF's then look at the patch map and creating your own custom instrument list on a song by song basis. You can also look at loading in audio files to play along with an SMF. This is where you can create your Real Tracks and Real Drums tracks and maybe only use the midi patches on the X8 for a few select instruments but I would make that much later, get used to creating and using basic GM midi files for now.

Don't be intimidated by all this. That manual is actually pretty clear and easy to read. It took me longer to write this out than it did to read about these functions in the manual. Don't look at all the confusing parts of that manual that have nothing to do with what we're discussing right now. Just read the sections about selecting a Performance, loading and playing songs, the PC card and connecting to your PC via USB.

Bob