The Weird One

The 80s were a hell of a decade, and right in the middle Boss came out with their micro-rack series. Most of the effects were pretty standard: reverbs, delays, compressors, phasers, flangers etc. But when it came to the delay effects (and there were multiple of them), they went a little bit wild. The most peculiar of the bunch was definitely the Boss RSD-10 sampler delay, which incorporated some features of a delay and some features of a sampler.

Naturally I wanted to play with one myself, and so...

Now as luck would have it, this is actually the second RSD-10 I bought. I had originally found a unit in good condition selling out of Italy for a pretty reasonable price, even factoring the shipping. I figured I likely wouldn't see one come up again any time soon, so I jumped on it. Wouldn't you know it, but a few days later one showed up in the US as broken for half the price. Due to the shipping time, the broken one actually showed up first, and I already had it fixed by the time that the good one arrived.

I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with two of them, but I suppose I'll figure something out.

I'm A Model, You Know What I Mean

This slab of silver is the Korg Z1. It's a physical modelling synthesizer that attempts (with a reasonable amount of success) to reproduce the sounds of acoustic instruments by, as the name suggests, modelling the physics of how they produce sound.

Despite being a late 1990s digital synth, the demand for this beast is still quite strong and they generally go for anywhere from $500 to $1000. Naturally I didn't pay $500 to $1000 for mine. Instead I only paid about $230. Well, ¥35,000 to be exact. Plus about $300 shipping to get it here from Japan.

Now you might say that this adds up to between $500 and $1000, but keep in mind that it costs about $250 to ship something like this across the US too, so I still came out well ahead.

How did I manage to score this discount, you ask? Well the auction listing clearly stated that two of the keys were stuck down. In fact, here's the photo from the auction:

I wonder what could cause that?

A mystery to be sure.

That doesn't mean that I'm home free in terms of repairs, though. This is still a mid-90s digital synth, which means we'll need to inspect it for capacitor and battery leakage before squirting a bunch of angry electrons into it.

The auction listing says it spent 20 years sitting in a closet, and yeah, that looks about right. The capacitors are all pristine. But how about that battery?

No leakage at least, but are there any electrons left inside?

Hmm, I'm gonna call this a "no".

Since this battery is soldered in, I'll need access to the back of the PCB, so out comes a few more screws.

Then I slurp the solder out and the battery comes free nice and easy. Time to give it the send-off it deserves.

Since I don't feel like keeping a supply of solder-tab batteries around, and since I don't like soldering batteries, I'll be installing a battery holder instead.

This style with the wires is really nice because you can install it in any PCB regardless of what footprint the battery uses. As long as the wires reach, you can just go ahead and solder it in. Like this.

And then a little square of velcro keeps it from rattling around loose.

So now we have a healthy 3.3v to keep the preset RAM saved when the synth is powered off.

So the board goes back in place.

And it's time for the moment of truth.

Well I guess Korg doesn't know how to spell "zed" but I'll give them a pass. Just this once.