Why See

So the first hardware synth I picked up was, by chance, a Yamaha Reface CS, being unloaded for cheap thanks to those four sweet words "For Parts or Repair". It's an analog modelling synthesizer, based loosely on the old Yamaha CS synths. Later on I picked up a Reface DX on a similar deal, with its lineage in the Yamaha DX line of FM synths, followed by a Reface CP which emulates a variety of smooth, soothing electric pianos including Yamaha's classic CP line.

But there was one instrument missing from this lineup: the YC. So naturally I had to buy one.

Wait, wrong Yamaha YC. That one's not repaired yet.

There we go, the Reface YC. That's the one I was looking for. As the name implies, it's an emulation of a variety of electronic organs, including the old Yamaha models like the YC-20 that it's sitting atop, but in a much smaller, more easily portable form.

I'm a little sad that I couldn't find one for parts or repair, but the pain of the price tag will soon be a distant memory, and all that will be left is the joy of playing with a new(-to-me) instrument.

Tools, Glorious Tools

Got a few minor tool-related upgrades lately, so I figured I'd tally them up in one post for the sake of brevity.

First up, a while back I got this drill press vise, and then later got a drill press to stick it on.

It's a perfectly lovely vise, quite low profile, but it does have two minor inconveniences.

First, it has a flange on both sides to bolt it down to the table. This is nice when you want to bolt it down to the table, but quite inconvenient if you happen to want to work with something off the edge of the vise.

Second, it has a little radiused notch near the fixed jaw to reduce the stress concentration there, which is nice for keeping the vise from snapping in half, but quite annoying when trying to use a set of parallels to raise an item up off the base of the vise.

So I got myself a different style of vise, this time opting for a Wilton. Naturally, the first thing I did was fill out and submit the warranty registration card.

This style of vise is slightly less low profile, replacing the flange along both edges with a notch that you can stick a set of toe clamps into to secure it to the table. It also lacks the notch near the fixed jaw, which means that it's compatible with parallels.

So that's nice. It's always good to have more options than you think you'll need when it comes to work holding.

Next up is my hack saw. I got this hack saw ages ago and I've been using the blade it came with well past its best-before date.

I mean it still has teeth and they don't look all that bad.

At least until you compare them with the teeth at the end where they aren't as worn.

That's a pretty big difference, I guess.

So for the replacement I decided to go a bit bougie with some Starrett blades.

Thankfully these are standardized so they just drop right in.

Speaking of dropping in, the upper frame of this hack saw actually has a compartment for storing extra blades.

But sticking the extra 9 blades of this 10-pack in there would make the saw heavier, and make it rattle around when I'm using it, so I'm not sure how keen I am on actually storing them in there.

Anyway, last up I finally got myself a tool belt.

I've been going up and down ladders a lot lately, and figured it wouldn't be the worst idea to finally give one of these a try. I guess I'll see how it goes.

The Beat of a Different Drum

So it's time for the internet to whisper those four sweet words into my ear: For Parts or Repair.

This is the Roland TR-8 drum machine. It was, a few years ago, Roland's flagship drum machine, delivering accurate digital emulations of the classic TR-808, TR-909, TR-606, and with and extra upgrade the TR-707 and TR-727 drum machines.

This one, however, is feeling a little less flagship than it might have when it originally came out of the box, especially considering the layer of cat hair and grime it came coated in.

Well, the seller said that it suffered some water damage and wouldn't turn on, so let's have a look inside to see how bad things are.

Well those components are definitely covered in rust and corr- wait no, that's spider poop.

Ok, hang on, if I just plug this into my bench supply...

Right, yes. So the Roland TR-8 (and a few other boxes they made in this era) use a bit of a peculiar 5.7v center-negative barrel jack power supply. Most barrel jack power supplies are center-positive, and so if you try to plug into one of those due to, for example, misplacing the original power supply amongst a giant pile of cat hair and grime, then the reverse protection diode won't allow any current to flow backwards through the unit, and it will simply appear dead and unresponsive.

I guess I'll have less to fix on this unit than I initially expected, so let's get it cleaned up and put into service, starting with the spider poop.

Yup, that looks fine now.

The main panel PCB, upon a cursory examination, shows no signs of damage or spider poop.

Though it's certainly hosting its own collection of grime.

On both the faders and the potentiometers.

But it's easy enough to clean off. The pots just get a quick wipe with alcohol and a lint-free cloth, and the fader dust shields get cleaned by peeling the dust off using some scotch tape.

The case and knobs take a swim in some borax to strip off all the hand cheese and pet residue, and then things go back together as they came apart.

Except for one little problem. I was about to line up all the knobs to take a beauty shot when I realized that the knob for the snare drum compression effect wasn't turning.

Ah yes, there's the supposed water damage.

The rust on this pot here has managed to cake up inside the bushing and freeze the plastic shaft in place almost completely. These are just inexpensive 9mm pots, but I don't have spares on hand at the moment, so let's pop it out and see if it can be fixed.

And by "pop it out" I mean "struggle to desolder it for 10 whole minutes" since Roland didn't skimp on the thickness of the ground planes for this PCB, and all that copper was doing an impressive job of wicking the heat away from the lead-free solder. I did eventually manage to free it after diluting that higher temp solder with some classic leaded solder, but it took some doing. If I had to service more than one of these pots I'd probably invest in some Rose's metal to melt into the joints to really drop the melting temperature.

Anyway, it's out, so I just need to fold up the tabs on the bottom to disassemble it.

These will eventually fatigue and break off, but you'll get at least one folding cycle if you're careful, maybe two if you're lucky.

Once the tabs are folded up, the body of the pot can slide out of the frame and the shaft can be pushed out of the bushing (with some difficulty in this case).

And yup, there's some rust in there.

Luckily there isn't a ton, so filing away a bit of the buildup followed by cleaning out the rust grime is enough to get the shaft spinning freely.

And then, importantly, we add some friction grease to make the pot feel buttery smooth.

The reassembly is a little bit fiddly since the wiper is not solidly attached to the shaft, but placing it on the underside of the shaft (the right way up) and lining up the pins works well, and the body of the pot can be slid back on and the tabs re-crimped.

Then it's just a matter of soldering it back into place, with some nice shiny leaded solder. This is, thankfully, much easier than desoldering it.

Everything seems to be in good order now, so it can all go back together, for real this time.

And I can finally get that glam shot I was looking for.

Though I suppose I should probably get a proper power supply for it now.

But the important thing is that it works. Well, the important thing is that it's clean and it works.

And as a bonus, I verified that it does have the 707 and 727 models unlocked, which is sweet.

What Strange Places This Adventure Has Taken Me

Who would have thought that in this, the year of our lord Two Thousand and Twenty Six, I'd be purchasing a pack of brand new cassette tapes.

The eagle-eyed among you might notice that these are Type I tapes and not the High-Bias Type II tapes that this 4-track recorder is designed to use. You see, this is deliberate: not only are the Type I tapes much cheaper, and thus less worrisome to mess around with, but the fact that they're the incorrect tape means that they'll have much more distortion than the correct Type II tapes.

And giving things a quick test, the audio I recored to this tape, when played back, sounds... really, really good. Like I've got some proper nice headphones and I can't hear a bit of distortion, hiss or really anything but the exact same audio pouring back into my ears that I recorded onto it.

That might sound like a good thing, but 90% of the point of buying this 4-track was to take advantage of its character and colouring of the audio, and if it's reproducing the input nearly perfectly then it's not exactly adding a whole lot of colour.

But all is not lost, there are techniques that can be employed to increase the distortion and noise levels. Turning off the dbx system, slowing the tape to 4.8 cm/s instead of the 9.5 cm/s setting, and messing up the gain staging and recording levels will do a lot to make the sound properly crunchy. And, honestly, being able to scale things down from a starting point of "almost CD quality" means I'll have lots of range to dial things in to my liking.

I do also have a Type II cassette on its way, which is about 3.5x the price of these Type I cassettes, so it'll be interesting to see if it responds differently to being driven into distortion.

I am kind of impressed, though. Having only experienced cassette tape through basic car head units, cheap walkman knock-offs, and bargain basement radio cassette players, I never really had the chance to experience the full quality that cassette tape could deliver.

Wibbly Wobbly

With the MC-505 up and running after the previous adventure with fixing its screen, I decided that it was time to tackle the wobbly knob-blies.

One of the tools/techniques that I didn't address in the video was using my vinyl cutter in order to cut out stencils of the reinforcement plate design so that I could check the dimensions against the actual system. This was a lot quicker and wasted a lot less planet-killing plastic than 3D printing out the pieces as I went.

This was made a bit more challenging than it might have otherwise been due to me using just some plain, lightweight printer paper, but I bought a brick of heavy card stock to use for the next project, which I'm sure won't take me 7-8 years to get around to using like this vinyl cutter has.

A Tale of Two Yamahas

I've been in a bit of a groovebox groove lately, what with stumbling across some good deals on an MC-303 and an MC-505, and wouldn't you know it but a Yamaha QY-100 popped up with my four favourite words attacked: For Parts or Repair.

The unit was reported as not booting up, and when I powered it on I could indeed verify that the screen just came up blank and the unit was unresponsive, however once I held down the right key combo I was able to get it into DFU mode (which stands for "Device Fucked Up Firmware Update") and so it likely just had some data corruption in its flash memory.

Oh and it's also missing the trim piece around the SmartMedia card slot.

I'll model up and 3D print a replacement for that bit later, after I make sure I can actually get this thing running.

So to fix the firmware corruption, all I should need to do is load up the firmware MIDI file into something like Sysex Librarian and pour it into the midi port once it's booted into DFU mode.

Except that actually doesn't work at all due to Sysex Librarian completely ignoring the midi message timing and blasting the entire file at full data rate while the system is busy doing stuff like pre-erasing the flash chip.

So instead I took the advice of Paul Carbone and downloaded XGWorks to my wintendo, an app that apparently hasn't been updated since the mid 90s, which is about the same time period as when this groovebox was made.

I gotta say, of all the MIDI playback programs in the world, this is one of them. I'm pretty sure that using another more modern midi player (rather than a sysex tool) would have also worked just fine, but the firmware update was already installing so I just went with it.

And about 20 minutes later: success!

So, onwards we go to Yamaha number 2, after a brief grass-touching break.

Grass: touched.

So again, this was just a coincidental find. I had been pondering the idea of picking up a 4-track cassette recorder like the (in)famous Tascam Portastudio 424, but since those have got a bit of a cult following they tend to command a bit of a premium on the used market these days.

However, Tascam wasn't the only company making 4-track cassette recorders, as you might have guessed by now, and the Yamaha MT4X was a direct competitor and generally an even match for the Tascam.

And wouldn't you know it, I heard those four sweet words: For Parts or Repair.

It was obviously filthy and the plastic was a bit scratched, and much to my dismay the input jacks seemed to have very poor connectivity. So, apart it comes.

Getting the main board out of a mixer like this is always a challenge, and Yamaha made this extra fun by using these plastic push-rivets to secure the rear face plate. Thankfully the center pin can be removed by just prying under the edge with a knife and then the rivet slides right out.

Naturally every knob has to come off, and after 30-odd years some of them are a bit more stuck than others. This is extra annoying since the knobs are recessed into the front panel by quite a bit. Thankfully I have a tool for that.

And then finally the main mixer board is out.

Time to give it cancer.

So with everything cleaned and lubricated, I reassembled the unit only to discover that the input jacks still had a dramatically poor connection. I poked around, scratched my head, and then realized that actually the mixer was just fine; it was the RCA to 1/4 TRS adapters I had used to connect my SK-88 Pro to the mixer which were to blame. Figures.

Anyway, I pulled up Amazon and ordered up some RCA to 1/4 TRS cables and threw the adapters in the trash, then gave the mixer a little spit-shine and I gotta say it came out looking pretty nice.

It could still use a bit more detailing but it's good enough for now.

And now I just need to find a cassette to stick in here... which will probably be its own adventure.