Yamaha MFC2
A small black footswitch that turned the WX7 wind controller into a two-voice solo machine - for $325.
Overview
The MFC2 is not a synthesizer or a tone generator, and it isn't much to look at. It's a MIDI foot controller, a box that sits on the floor and does what your feet tell it while your hands are busy with a wind controller. Yamaha built it specifically to expand the expressiveness of the WX7 Wind MIDI Controller. That narrow purpose is the whole story. Contemporary coverage listed it at $325, which in the late-1980s MIDI accessory market was real money for a footswitch. But the MFC2 was never just a sustain pedal.
It lets a player drive two separate MIDI channels at once, and drive them differently. The Key Hold footswitch, for instance, lets the player sustain a note on one channel while playing an independent line on another. For a wind player that's the whole trick: hold a pad or a drone under your feet, blow a melody over the top, and one person sounds like two. The MFC2 sits inline via MIDI between the WX7's power pack and whatever synth or sound generator is downstream. It adds no sounds of its own. It re-routes and gates what the wind controller sends.
The front panel carries Bank Select and Program Select switches, and Yamaha rated the unit to call up any of a connected sound generator's 30 patches. LED indicators show the selected patch and also display data for up to six parameters per program. That is more feedback than most foot controllers of the period bothered to give. Standing at a mic with a wind controller in your mouth, you are not bending down to squint at a rack unit.
The period press treated it as a working tool rather than a curiosity. Recording Engineer (June 1989, p.45) profiled session saxophonist Tom Scott, who ran a Yamaha WX7 into a rack holding a TX81Z, a TX802, an SPX90 and an MFC2 for large-venue touring. He kept a simpler WX11 and WT11 rig for other work. The MFC2 lived in the racks of players who had already committed to the WX ecosystem and wanted more control than the wind controller alone could give. The same period coverage noted third-party sound designers building patch banks specifically tailored to the WX-series and the MFC2, so the controller had enough of a user base to attract aftermarket support.
The MFC2 is a MIDI utility - no sound, no filters, no oscillators. Its value is tied to whether someone is running a WX-series controller and wants the two-channel layering trick. The $325 original price and the modest patch-call ceiling of 30 programs date it firmly to its moment. Units surface occasionally, usually detached from the wind controllers they were bought to serve. For a buyer, the practical question is whether there's a WX7 and a rack of MIDI gear that needs a foot on it. Without those, it's a well-made box with nothing to do.
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