Red and Sticky

So recently I came upon a fantastic find, a Roland D-50 listed for sale at an absolute bargain price with those four little words I love so much: For Parts or Repair!

Wait, wait; actually my bad, this is the Roland D-70, the much loathed and resented synthesizer that was based on a completely different line of synths, and only gained the D- prefix when Roland realized that people really loved the D-50 and decided that phoning in a follow-up would be a really great plan.

It was actually the bridge between the Roland U-20/U-220 (and can even take the same expansion cards) and the later JD-800 in terms of lineage, and other than a few notable faults (like an underpowered CPU that can bog down under high load leading to slower than usual ADSR envelopes and LFO modulations, and the sound structure where tones are shared between patches) it wasn't a terrible synth. It just wasn't a D-50, a crime for which it will never be forgiven.

Anyway, that's really neither here nor there. This one is mine now, and it needs some fixing, so click through the break to read more.

If I Had A Nickel For Every Time

I got a few new bits of gear added to the pile recently, and both were half-rack modules, both produced no sound, and both, curiously, suffered from a shorted aluminum electrolytic capacitor which is a very unusual failure mode.

First up, the Boss RRV-10 Reverb. This reverb unit has a delightfully crunchy 12 bit sound to the echo signal which makes it honestly kind of an amazing effect. But it won't do me any good if it's dead, so it needs some fixin'.

Next is the Yamaha FB-01, which is a 4-operator FM sound module. It's mostly notable for the SolBass preset, but it has some other nice sounds in it. Or, at least, it would have other nice sounds if it wasn't just spitting out nothing but hum and noise. So it gets some fixin' too.

You might be wondering why it looks like the FB-01 has a black hole on its surface. The reason is pretty simple: at some point someone decided that it needed to have a sticker, and then at some later point someone decided that it needed to not have a sticker. That latter person scrubbed pretty hard to get the sticker and its residue off, and left a bit of a ring in the paint.

I hit it with some car polish and got it looking a lot better.

The remaining ring is much less visible but still there, and I can't really fully get rid of it without polishing the whole case to a high shine, which would look kind of out-of-place, so I'm leaving it like this.

I did at least take off some grime while I was doing that polish.

So that's a nice bonus.

April Showers

Wait, why is it raining in April? Well, no matter, the wet spring is at least being good to my plants.

Most of my plants, that is. This sage that I planted in the front last year got immediately attacked by some kind of flies that loved chewing on the leaves. I was hoping that applying some insecticide might knock them back enough for the plant to out-grow their damage, but they didn't really manage it before the chill of winter set in, and while only one of them properly died, the other two were looking like pure ass and so I decided to ditch the lot of them and start over with something else.

After all, I can't exactly use the sage leaves in cooking if I'm constantly drenching them with insecticide.

In their place I decided to plant this sunpatiens. I'm hoping they're more patien than sun, since they're being planted on the north side of the house, but I guess we'll find out. They were in the shade section of the nursery so if this goes wrong I'll blame them.

And if they do die, you can write this variety down on your list of plants to not buy.

Speaking of dead plants, most of my lantana made it through the winter. One, however, did not. This trend is at least heading in the right direction.

So it's out with the dead and in with the live.

I went with a purple variety this time to see if it might be more hardy and for a bit of variety and definitely not because the nursery didn't have any of the confetti variety that I've been planting in prior years.

I guess we'll see if I just wasted $15. It should at least look nice for the summer.

Out, damn spot, out!

So a while back I managed to get a few tiny drips of red latex house paint on my blue shorts. I didn't notice them until after they had dried, at which point it seemed to be too late to remove them. Most methods of removing paint involve high heat, which would melt the fabric, harsh chemicals, which would melt the fabric, or scraping with a sharp implement, which would melt shred the fabric.

However, by chance I was cleaning a mark off a door frame this morning when I decided to try a little rubbing alcohol to loosen the smudge of dirt. It did loosen the dirt, as well as the paint underneath it. Oops!

But that's when inspiration naturally struck: the fabric of my shorts won't be affected by the alcohol, and yet latex paint clearly will be. This called for some science.

Well I'll be, it worked. But science is worthless if an experiment can't be repeated, so let's try another spot.

And the verdict is...

Success!

It took quite a bit of scrubbing with the alcohol to get the paint to fully vanish, but the important part is that I got there in the end.

Hot Lead

So I decided that today was a good day for some Saturday night soldering. I've been sitting on this Relatively Universal ROM programmer kit for a while, and I figured it was time to put it together.

All of the itty bitty SMD components come pre-soldered, and it's just the headers and the ZIF socket that need to be tended to.

For no reason other than"I felt like it", I went for the ZIF socket first.

The Arduino headers came next, and I used an Arduino as a jig to hold them in the correct orientation.

And the programmer goes on top, ready for soldering.

Once the ends of each pin header strip are tacked in place, I can take it off and do the rest of the soldering without the Arduino underneath.

And that looks a little something like this.

A few more bits get soldered on the other side. A L-shaped jumper thing near the ZIF socket arm, and a header for an OLED screen that I don't actually have but should maybe probably get.

Plugging it in reveals that things are basically functional, so far as I can tell without a ROM to plug into it.

Of course just having raw PCBs sitting on whatever surface I place this on isn't really the most ideal situation, so I'll go ahead and print out a low-profile case for the Arduino. This marks the first time I've ever printed a downloaded model, so let's hope it goes well.

While that's going, I have some tact switches that need to be replaced in a synth which I am not acknowledging the existence of because I haven't finished repairing it yet.

It's out with the old...

And I forgot to take a picture of the "in with the new". Well, just pretend it looks like the picture previous to this one, but with newer looking switches.

All told, I replaced quite a few switches.

57 of them to be exact.

Which makes for 228 solder joints that were desoldered and resoldered.

And just in time, the print is done.

As I expected from looking at the model, some of the overhangs and bridges didn't print too amazingly well.

But a bit of trimming with a hobby knife cleaned things up well enough to work.

And the ROM programmer still fits on top.

So I'll call that a success, and another project checked off the list.

When They Go High

We go low.

I don't own a bass guitar (yet) and so in order to continue not owning a bass guitar (for now) I decided to experiment with a different approach to producing bass-like noises (in the interim).

This is the Boss OC-5 Octave pedal. It takes a guitar (or other musical) signal in on the right, does some elven wizardry inside, and emits an octave-shifted signal out the left. It's quite fancy in the realm of octave pedals, having options to use a vintage-style tracking that warbles like a demon possessed if you play more than one note at a time, or the more modern mode that can track all six guitar strings separately and create a stable, octave-shifted output signal.

You can configure it to produce an octave-up signal, which produces a rather interesting chorused 12-string-ish tone when mixed with the direct signal, or produce an octave-down signal to get some bass-style tones. There's also an option for 2 octaves down, but it's only enabled in the vintage mode; in the modern poly mode that knob dials in how many notes it tracks and shifts.

So far I'm quite impressed. It's doing a basically transparent job of tracking the notes I play and shifting them, which is quite a bit better than the octave effect that's on my Zoom MS50G multi-effects pedal (though to be fair, I was having unrelated difficulties with power supply noise on that when I was testing, which may have affected the tracking quality).

Speaking of the MS50G, I'm thinking of putting together an actual proper pedal board with this, probably going for Zoom MS50G <- Boss DC-2w <- Boss OC-5 <- Boss CP-1x. This will allow me to run a Amp Sim <- Reverb <- Delay in the MS50G, get the chorus from the DC-2w, the octave effect from the OC-5, and a compression at the start from the CP-1x to even things out and bring up sustain. I probably won't run the chorus and octave together, but who knows, I can experiment.

Of course that does mean I'll need a pedal board to assemble this chain onto...

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.