sepiareverb wrote:I've certainly not found a way to edit anything beyond volume or choosing a particular sound. Nothing I do seems to accomplish anything when making changes to the drawbars or turning knobs.
This is really a different question. Your original question was about using the keyboards without a computer. This question is about how to edit sounds. So addressing this new question:
On either the Fantom-0 OR the Nord Stage 3, no editing of existing sounds is done on the computer. The computer is only used to add additional sounds that are not already in the keyboard. Once they're in the keyboard, all the editing can be done right on the keyboard. (This is different from your Yamaha MX, where most sound editing requires that you connect to a computer and run a third party editor.)
Editing on the Nord is easier than editing on the Roland.
On the Nord, there are two panels. As long as you pay attention to which of the two are active, any change you make to a drawbar or knob will affect the sound you are hearing. Each knob performs one dedicated function, or sometimes a second function if used in conjunction with the Shift button.
On the Fantom, it's a bit more complicated...
... Instead of two panels, you can have as many as 16 zones. Conceptually though, the idea is the same, to the extent that before you edit something, you need to make sure you've selected the panel or zone you want to edit, otherwise adjusting a control may not do what you expect (or it may do nothing at all).
... Instead of knobs/buttons/sliders that can do only one or perhaps two dedicated things, many Fantom controls can do many different things, in different circumstances.
Illustrating a difference using your drawbar example, there are two kinds of organ sounds in the Roland. Some are samples of organ sounds, and those inherently do not support drawbar adjustment. But there's also a drawbar organ engine more like Nord's, the VTW (virtual tonewheel) engine, and if you use a VTW sound, then the sliders will indeed let you adjust the drawbar levels. So for the sliders to work as drawbars, the organ sound must specifically be a VTW sound (which, BTW, can only be used in zone 2), AND you have to SELECT the zone 2 sound and hit the PARAMeter button which will allow the sliders to specifically address your zone 2 sound (which is your VTW organ). Obviously, this is more complicated than on the Nord, where the drawbars always affect the organ sound. So Nord drawbar manipulation is simpler, but the tradeoff is that those 9 sliders can never be used for anything OTHER than controlling organ parameters, whereas the sliders on the Roland can also be used for other things.
BTW, the way to set up an organ scene in the Roland so that you can most easily access the drawbar functions is (a) put a VTW organ sound in Zone 2 (the only zone you can put a VTW organ into), and then (b) save that scene with Zone 2 as the primary ("selected") sound. Now, whenever you call up that Scene from the touchscreen, all you have to do is hit the PARAM button, and the screen will instantly switch to the drawbar display and your sliders will instantly control the drawbars (well, the first 8 of the 9). Until you hit the PARAM button, the sliders function in their default manner, where slider 1 is the volume for the sound in zone 1, slider 2 is the volume for the sound in zone 2, etc.
It's not insurmountable, but there's definitely more of a learning curve to the Roland. The Nord and the Roland well illustrate the trade-off between simplicity and flexibility... though the Stage 3 is not the easiest of the "simplicity" boards, and the Roland is not the most complicated of the "flexibility" boards!