Floss Regularly

When we last saw my trusty JX-305 it was literally yesterday and I thought I was done with messing around with it. However, this morning I was reminded that when I first got it, it was pretty filthy, and in particular the keys were a huge mess. I had cleaned them up from the topside, but there's only so much dirt you can get out that way. In particular, the dirt that builds up between the keys tends to be basically inaccessible to this kind of cleaning.

And let's not forget the dirt at the back of the keys.

As much as I wish I could forget the dirt at the back of the keys.

Well, only one thing to do, let's pull it apart.

This is, thankfully, a pretty easy task. Or it would be, if Roland hadn't stuck one (1) screw underneath the main PCB, which requires completely removing it to access. Oh well, it's only another half dozen screws.

Speaking of many things, I can't get the keys off with the springs still attached, so off they come. Both the white keys...

And the black keys...

And a bunch of dog and/or cat hair, I guess. I'm pretty sure these springs are identical, but it pays to keep them separated just in case.

Also say hello to this friendly little ladybug taking a nap behind one of the keys.

I don't think I'll have to be too careful about waking it up.

Anyway, the keys aren't quite free yet, I need to remove a set of black plastic retention strips on the underside first.

Then the keys can start coming off, and yuck.

That is definitely some grime.

When it comes to this kind of grime, my go-to is always borax, with a little dish soap to help get things started. Alkaline cleaners really do an amazing job of chemically destroying oily schmoo like this.

And while we're cleaning the keys, the keybed frame could use at least a little dusting.

I didn't go bonkers on this part because it's largely out of sight, out of mind, and there's some grease on the grommets and at the back where the keys hinge that I don't feel like reapplying. So a quick blast with compressed air and a little vacuuming will get rid of most of the pet hair and dust.

And now that the keys have had a little swim, followed by a little shower, I can shake off the majority of the water and drop them back into place.

And a little bit of reassembly followed by a quick spit shine and hopefully this is the last I'll need to mess with this keyboard for quite a while.

But who knows what tomorrow will bring?

A Little Tact Goes A Long Way

When last we saw my trusty JX-305 I had pulled one of the main front panel boards to straighten up the potentiometers that had, over time, become bent and askew. For reasons that I will perhaps never understand, I didn't take this opportunity to replace the tact switches, perhaps because I had assumed they were functioning properly, or perhaps because I had forgotten that they most certainly were not.

Well, today I'm fixing that oversight. Thankfully it's not too hard to dig into this particular synth, but it does take quite a lot of screws to get there.

This one here is the right-side panel board, and contains most of the tact switches, including most of the most used tact switches, like the PTN/SONG, SHIFT and the patch number 3 button, which I guess is a pretty popular patch number. I bring these up because they were among the least responsive buttons on the whole synth, and the SHIFT button not working kind of blocks off a lot of functions, as you might imagine.

As per usual, it's out with the old and in with the new. I didn't take a lot of photos because I was powering through this one, but here's the left side panel with all the switches replaced.

And the combined pile of oxidized crustiness.

Then, as per usual, I just need to throw the boards and screws back in, shake things around until everything settles into place, and it's back up and running.

So why fix the JX-305 now? Well I've been practicing a song and while I'd usually just use one of my Reface keyboards to chill on the couch while playing, this particular song needs more than 37 keys. As it happens, the JX-305 is my lightest 61 key synth (despite having a pretty solid aluminum chassis), so it got conscripted into service as a slightly more awkward couch synth.

Breathe Easy

It's that furnace filter changing time of year again. Except this will be the first filter change for the HRV pre-filter after being installed for roughly 6 months.

But before I clean the HRV prefilter I need to clean the HRV preprefilter, as it's managed to get plugged up a little bit.

It's not a complete disaster but this is definitely something I'll need to add to my regular maintenance checklist.

All that dust and fluff got sucked inside of course, so naturally I did this part before changing the filter so it wouldn't just immediately muck up the new one. And speaking of changing the filter, let's see how the old one looks compared to the new one.

Ok, yup, that's a bit of a difference. Let's have a look in some better lighting though.

Well alrighty then. I'm glad that dust is in the filter and not in my lungs.

The furnace filter managed to fare a bit better, though it's also much bigger so the dust and dirt is spread over a larger area.

But it's still definitely time for a replacement.

The Beat of A Different Drum

I don't have an especially wide variety of drum machines hiding amongst my growing pile of synths, and one of the areas that didn't have great coverage was the late 80s style digital e-drums. Didn't, until now that is.

The Kawai R50e is a drum machine hailing from the late 80s and is filled with samples of atomic-blast style gated reverb snares, Simmons style toms, and sampled bass and orchestra hits for that extra "the 90s are just around the corner" vibe.

These hard-hitting drum sounds are favoured by people producing in the industrial genre, but they also work well with synth pop and its elevated evolution city pop. It's the latter that's of primary interest to me.

There was nothing terribly wrong with this unit when it arrived, quite appropriately, from Japan. It was uncharacteristically filthy though, with plenty of tobacco tar, sweat, and a little bit of mold coating it inside and out. Luckily it cleaned up pretty nicely, though it still has a bit of an aroma if you get right in close and sniff, but most people don't play drum machines with their nose so that's not really a big deal.

Also arriving from the land of the rising sun in the same package was this delightful rack effects unit.

This is the Boss VF-1, which is, along with the SX-700 that I covered in another blog post, the follow up to the SE-70 and SE-50, which I also covered in another blog post. Other than a few guitar-specific models that I probably won't bother with, this pretty much completes my collection of Boss rack multi-effects boxes.

This unit's claim to fame largely revolves around the inclusion of the COSM amp and mic simulators, but other party tricks include an acoustic guitar simulator, and a guitar-to-midi processor that lets you control a synth with a guitar signal. Also according to this preset it'll give you free gender reassignment surgery so that's cool.

It's a little more guitar-focused than my other Boss rack effects, but it'll still be useful for my purposes.

Stepping Up

When I purchased this house, what I was really after was the welcome mats at the front door. The rest of the house, the land, and so on was really just icing on the cake.

Unfortunately this may not have been the fantastic bargain I was counting on, as one of the mats is very much falling apart, and getting to the point where it's shedding more dirt, which gets tracked into the house, than it's keeping out.

Luckily the solution is simple.

Well that was easy.

Though, I suppose it now leaves me with a new problem. Let's see if we can solve that one too.

Ok, yes, that's more like it. This is a molded rubber door mat which should hopefully give me a suitable surface to stomp dirt off my shoes before entering the house.

And presumably send appropriately decorative vibes to the occasional door-to-door tea salesman who, for some reason, thought I might like to buy tea in the middle of the afternoon. Is that a thing people do? Buy tea from people who show up unannounced at their doorstep?

Electronic Music

So the thing about electronic music is that it runs on electrons, and you need to get those electrons in and out of the music somehow. In the case of my MPC-1000, this happens via a fairly standard IEC C14 connector on the back panel.

I say "fairly standard" because this one has some aftermarket modifications.

You're not normally supposed to be able to see light through them. I was going to show the cracked shell on the bench but when I tried to push the crack open a little bit, well...

Anyway, the good news is that this is a simple fix. Just take off the heat shrink, unsolder the wires from the old connector, solder them to the new connector, forget to slide the heat shrink on so depin the PCB connector to slide the pieces on from the other end, shrink the heat shrink, reassemble the PCB connector...

And then pop it back into place.

Looks good as new, aside from the staining on the sheet metal. But that just adds character and tone to the sounds.

And the good news is that it even still works!

So that's nice.

In ROD We Trust

A few more Boss Micro Rack units popped up for reasonable prices, so allow me to introduce the ROD-10.

This is an overdrive/distortion unit. Overdrive and distortion are basically two versions of the same thing, but when you alter the parameters you get sonically different profiles, so people have gravitated towards a few particular combinations of those parameters over the years.

Most overdrive tones tend to produce a rather shrill and grating tone, which is, for the most part, completely unlistenable. It does have some utility when you're in a noisy band where the drummer won't shut up for even a single beat and the bassist is drunk on his own sonic mud; that screeching tone tends to cut through so that the audience can actually hear the lead guitar.

However, there are also some more gentle forms of distortion which add some spectral complexity. When listened to raw they still tend to sound a bit irritating, but if you scoop out some of the frequencies with, for example, a parametric EQ, then you can produce some chill, nostalgic tones. Like listening to an AM broadcast on an old clock radio, or playing back a tape in a deck that cost less than one week's allowance.

And wouldn't you know it, Boss was kind enough to produce an overdrive/distortion box that has a built-in parametric EQ. How convenient!

As expected, this box can take a thin, boring sound and fill out the spectrum, which can then be sculpted back to produce a warm, ear-filling tone. It's obviously quite useful for guitar, which pretty much any O/D box will be, but the ability to dial back the distortion also makes it work well for synths which are naturally more sonically complex from the start. I primarily intend to use this with the latter.

But there's two boxes here, and the second one isn't an ROD-10, but rather an RDD-10.

Boss made a few delay boxes in this series, and we've seen a few like the RPS-10 and RSD-10. Like those boxes, this one is a delay, but its party trick is that it has a built-in LFO that can modulate the delay time.

Changing the delay time on a delay unit doesn't just change how quickly the echoes come back, it also changes the pitch of anything already in the delay buffer, since it'll be playing back that buffer at a different rate than when it was recorded.

This feature can be very useful for adding a bit of pitch instability to the sound without affecting the initial pitch: by setting the modulation amount low and the rate low, the echos will be subtly detuned. You can also set the modulation rate high to get a tremolo-like effect. Or set them both to silly levels to get a truly absurd sound. You can also get swimming, phasing sounds by dialing back the delay time and cranking the feedback to give the notes a warbling tail.

I'm not usually a huge fan of delay units, despite owning a few, but the sonic flexibility to move beyond just "make an echo noise" really makes this one a keeper.