jazz rhythms on fantomX

Try Band in a box.

Hi cuborg - This was one of my first questions here. For all the traditional jazz patches on the Fantom, there sure are no jazz, blues, swing, rhythms. But lots and lots of hip hop. Like what were they thinking.

1. P 187 of the manual talks about the "grid" and changing it to change the beat and shuffle. I found this to be very unsatisfactory.

2. With Band in a Box there are tons of great percussions - just what we want. I have tired to put some into the Fantom by examining the BIAB piano roll and then manually entering them into the Fantom. Better, but a tedious process, and not that good.

3. You can bring in a BIAB drum track (saved as midi) into Fantom as a song, and just play and loop it in the Fantom sequencer. Not bad, but not as handy as rhythm patterns.

4. Best hope - Perplextor (active on this site) offers a program called "Fantom Midi Import Tool" (http://www.perplextor.de/fantom-tools/manual/fmfit.asp) where you can save a measure or two of a BIAB (or whatever) rhythm (or arpeggios). This program will read it in and spit out the rhythm pattern to the Fantom. This is what we want! But, I can't get it to work. Still trying.

Let me know what you learn. Good luck

thanks guys, but I'd like to avoid dealing with computers as much as possible.
What you propose I'd need to have 2 programs to load some rhythms. There is no easier way?
What is the deal with that Perplextor, fantomX has no option on his own to load midi patterns ???
I was thinking more like having pack of e.g. 100 midi rhythms that I could load in to fantom and jam with. Why I need a program for that?

You don't need a program for using Jazz rhythms. Any midi rhythm file you get will do. Use it as a song or song pattern and play it in performance mode while playing with the rhythm.

Even in this case, you have you use GM-drumsounds, or you have to adjust the midi data to the better sounding drum sets you would like to use on the Fantom (adjust within a PC drum program, a PC sequencer or Fantom Song/Track edit).

The other way is Perpextors very useful Fantom Midi Import Tool, which allows you to exchange Fantom user Rhythm patterns with those of your own choice. Have a look at it: it's a little bit of work for you once, but then you got your own drum rhythms. These rhythms have the advantage of being directly accessible like a drum machine, without having to use song functions (drum tracks or patterns).

I use several hundred midi file drum patterns, which I bought from Groove Monkee and others, on Fantom Flash Cards (e.g. one Flash card only with Jazz drum patterns). Whenever I'm in search for a rhytm for practising or arrangaing a song I find something suitable among them. That's the song solution I first mentioned.

By the way, in this case it is *much* easier to search and edit suitable patterns on PC and then use them via Flash card on the Fantom, than doing search and edit jobs on the Fantom itself. So why not do an intelligent job split between PC and workstati?

As far as I tested, pure solutions (*only* workstation versus *only* software) rarely make any practical sense.