This post first appeared on our Defective forum on December 24, 2022 (a holiday present!), but since we’ve since retired the forum, we are reposting here to preserve the information!
When I first announced Fauxmo in 2019, I also said that I would be releasing the details of what I learned about the Fizmo, so others didn’t need to redo all the work in reverse engineering.
After more than 3 years now, I still haven’t gotten to the “cleaning up” of the documentation that I intended to do, and so after re-looking at it all, and realizing that it’s not so bad as is, I’ve decided to just release it all in its current state.
Credit where credit is due – as I mention in the Fauxmo documentation, I built upon the work of others to be successful. In particular I’d like to mention Ingo Debus, who created the original Fizmo editor within Emagic’s SoundDiver platform, as well as Dan Gordon, who made incredible strides in documenting the Fizmo’s sound parameters, but sadly never finished. You’ll see that one of the documents included is one that he originally started – I simply edited and added to that one, noting my contributions where I made them. Dave Cornutt also took an initial crack at deciphering the Fizmo, and I took a look at his efforts as well.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention how much was derived from the Ensoniq MR SysEx documentation, which thankfully was published. There are lots of similarities to the Fizmo’s structure (though several important differences too!), and so I’ve included that document in the package below as well.
The documentation is incomplete (you’ll see that I stopped work on the Insert effects section, as it is largely identical to the MR’s). Importantly, you’ll see sections of the Fizmo patch dump that are still mysteries – I’d LOVE for others to dive in and figure out what those are for!
Finally, both Dan Gordon and I are of the opinion that it’s likely that all of the Fizmo’s parameters, not just ones that map to the front panel controls, are controllable by NRPN values. You’ll see in fact that in the documentation that he started, there’s a column for “Difference from Param number” precisely for this reason. It would make developing new editors SO much easier in the future if all of the parameters were addressable via controller messages, and not just SysEx. So that’s a new challenge for anyone that wants to take it up!
Enjoy! And please let me know if you have any corrections or additions – I’d greatly appreciate it.
https://defectiverecords.com/fauxmo/Ensoniq_Fizmo_SysEx_documentation.zip
-Dan Nigrin