Month: August 2017

Roland Juno 106 (#7) – this is New Jersey

Roland Juno 106
Roland Juno 106

Sold! Now FOR SALE in our Reverb shop!

I bought this Juno from a guy named Mike in South Jersey, with a shaved head and a gold chain. I met up with him at his garage studio behind a roller rink, where the Juno had been used for over 25 years by musicians providing live accompaniment for the roller skaters. Now the music is performed by two “old cowboys” (his words) on two Hammond console organs. I also met Mike’s overweight English bulldog, who he introduced to me as his girlfriend. I think her name was Bethany. Continue reading “Roland Juno 106 (#7) – this is New Jersey”

Desoldering Tutorial: Tools, Techniques and Helpful Tips

the frikkin desoldering gauntlet

I would say that desoldering is much harder than soldering. It took me a couple weeks to get good at soldering and several years to get good at desoldering, partly because I didn’t used to do it as often when I first got into electronics, just building circuits from kit PCBs and schematics. Working on old synths though, I have to desolder all kinds of things constantly from different kinds of boards and have refined my techniques pretty well, so I thought I’d share some of what I’ve learned here. Continue reading “Desoldering Tutorial: Tools, Techniques and Helpful Tips”

Korg Electribe ESX-1, continued

A few weeks ago I wrote about a “job” I did on one of my own pieces of gear, my Korg Electribe ESX-1. After replacing the pots (explained in previous post) and feeling so hopeful for my Electribe’s future, I later realized the biggest problem that causes the Electribe controls to jitter is NOT the pots themselves as it so often is with other pieces of gear, but rather induced electrical noise from the circuit board underneath affecting the voltages being sent to the A/D circuitry by the pots. Continue reading “Korg Electribe ESX-1, continued”

Korg MonoPoly

Korg MonoPoly
Korg MonoPoly

This MonoPoly had the worst kind of problem when it arrived: a very intermittent problem. It had a tendency to fade out randomly, and then randomly fade back in. The first day it was here, we ran it for 12 hours continuously without any such incident. It took us a long time to figure out what was going on because it was hard to get it to replicate the problem. Continue reading “Korg MonoPoly”

EML ElectroComp 101 – 1 volt per octave conversion mod

This is a really fun synth! EML was a lesser-known American synth company competing with Moog and ARP during the 1970s and made some unique instruments. The EML-101 is a semi-modular duophonic synth similar in structure to the ARP 2600 and very unique and powerful. The bulk of our work on this involved designing and installing a circuit that allows the synth to accept standard 1 volt per octave-scaled CV via its “SEQ” input, as its oscillators have an unusual scale of 1.4 V/octave with a 4.6-volt DC offset. Continue reading “EML ElectroComp 101 – 1 volt per octave conversion mod”