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3
Making Memories
This section explains the Fantom-X’s
“memory,” a geeky term for “the place it puts
things.” It’s important to understand how its
memory operates as you develop your own
way of working on the Fantom-X.
The Fantom-X has quite a lot of stuff to hold
onto, from its built-in waveforms on up to
the songs you record. There are:
• things the Fantom-X needs to do its job—such as the PCM
waveforms that provide the basis for patches and rhythm
sets, the factory patches, rhythm sets and performances,
the Fantom-X demos, their samples, and so on.
• your own materials—such as your patches, rhythm sets,
performances, songs, samples, the user rhythm patterns,
rhythm groups, arpeggios, and your system settings.
Since these materials are used in different ways, the
Fantom-X utilizes three different types of memory, with each
one perfectly suited to the stuff it holds.
ROM
“ROM” is the acronym for “Read-Only
Memory.” It’s called “read-only” because
you can use what it holds, but you can’t
change, or “re-write” it, yourself. ROM’s
where the Fantom-X keeps its:
• PCM waveforms—These are the built-in sound recordings
that the Fantom-X patches and rhythm sets play when
they aren’t playing samples you’ve captured or imported.
• presets—These are the preset factory patches, rhythm sets,
performances, demos, and demo samples.
Detour—How the Fantom-X Measures Things
In the next few sections, we’ll be talking about the sizes of
certain things: memory sizes, song sizes, sample sizes. You’ll
see things described as being so many “K,” “MB,” or “GB” in size.
If you know what these abbreviations mean, you can skip
this section and head straight to the next one. If not, take a
moment, and read on.
The Fantom-X measures objects by their size in bytes, as any
computer-based device does. Even the smallest samples
and songs are thousands of bytes in size, so their sizes are
counted in thousands of bytes to make life easier: kilobytes,
or “KB.” But those are smaller samples and songs. Bigger ones
are thousands of kilobytes in size—that’s a million bytes,
son—and they’re measured in megabytes, or “MB.” One form
of memory in the Fantom-X can be a billion bytes in size, or 1
GB for “gigabyte.”
Okay? Moving on...
RAM
“RAM” stands for “Random Access Memory,” though that doesn’t
matter much here (computer historians, look elsewhere). What
matters is what RAM is: lightning fast. Because of this, RAM
makes an ideal place for holding things you’re working with,
or working on. When you play or edit most anything on the
Fantom-X, it’s in RAM.