Jazz Teddy Bears - Setting up a WX5 rig

Setting up a WX5 rig

This tutorial walks through how I have set up my WX5 rig, which consists of:

a WX5, using wireless MIDI
a VL70‑m synth module, with Patchman's Turbo VL chip
a Lexicon MX400 effects processor for reverb/delay, and other effects
a MOTU Audio Express to mix everything together
a Behringer FCB1010 foot controller
a laptop running Ableton Live

Click here to see the complete layout.

Backing up the configurations

Once you've got everything set up, it would be wise to backup your configurations.

Backing up the VL70‑m

I use the venerable MIDI-OX to receive Sysex dumpsRecording these in my DAW (Reaper) seems to work, but saving them in a file puts them in a MIDI wrapper. Loading them back in and sending them to the device would probably work, but saving the raw stand-alone Sysex data would seem to make more sense..

From the main menu, choose View | Sysex..., and then Sysex | Receive manual dump...

In the VL70‑m, go to the UTILITY page and choose DUMPOUT. There are 4 things that can be dumped:

system settings
current patch (not needed)
custom patches (not needed)
internal patches (your patch configurations)

Choose what you want to dump, and you should see the data being received in the MIDI-OX window. When the VL70‑m has finished sending the data, click Done and save the .syx file (Display Window | Save As...).

If there are problems, you can try slowing down the rate at which the VL70‑m sends the data, by pressing UTIL, choosing SYSTEM, and setting DumpIntrval to 300This is the number of milliseconds the VL70‑m will delay for between sending blocks of data, so larger numbers mean slower transfer..

Backing up the FCB1010

The Mountain Utilities program can be used to easily backup the FCB1010 configuration.

Note that the resulting .syx file contains the configuration data; the .fcb file contains the banks and preset names, if you have configured them.

Backing up the Lexicon MX400

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to do this. I keep a text file that records which factory patches are stored in each user slot, and try to keep customizations of these patches to a minimum.