synthesizer repair in Philadelphia
We had a week full of Junos (Junoes?), with three Juno 60s and four Juno 106es here all at once. These are the ones I did last week in between grinding away at various aspects of an insane Minimoog Model D restoration I’m working on and building a new power supply for a Rhodes Chroma.
This is a pretty much shockingly underrated and powerful synth. I can’t believe you can get one of these for $600 in a world where a Juno 106 costs twice as much. Continue reading “Akai AX-60”
This RS-09 died in a basement flood and has rusty bubbles all over its panel. It has a helpful piece of masking tape labeling the notes on the keyboard with their note names. We were tasked with fixing it basically for as little money as possible, but the only thing we could have done but didn’t do was make it look nicer. Continue reading “Roland RS-09”
Since I always do pretty much the same work on every Juno and have posted about it 7 times, this time I’m going to go more into depth about two specific, very common problems a Juno 106 chorus/jack board can have. Continue reading “Roland Juno 106 (#8) – common problems with the Juno chorus”
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”
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”
I was kind of excited to work on this because it is the close relative of my own and favorite polysynth, the Kawai SX-240. The repair job started out smoothly and then descended into hell. Continue reading “Kawai SX-210”
After I finished actually working on this Juno, I finally caved in to my perverse scientific curiosity and decided to see if I could use parts from a few half-failed Juno chips (ones from various Juno 106s I’ve worked on, that weren’t fully restored by the soaking/stripping process) to create some fully-functioning ones. Continue reading “Roland Juno 106 (#6)”
The Jupiter 6 is one of Roland’s two most beloved 80’s polysynths, the other being the Jupiter 8. While I was looking for service documents for the Jupiter 6 though, I came across some absurdly aggressive forum posts from people who don’t like this synth and are pointlessly mad that a lot of other people like it a lot. Continue reading “Roland Jupiter 6 – calibration tips”