Roland CSQ-600: in which the tech replaced the NiCad memory battery but installed the replacement battery in a ziploc bag ziptied to the mains wiring.
One interesting thing about restoring vintage synths is that almost every instrument that we work on has been worked on by another tech at least once before. And it seems that more often than not, those other techs were… not great. We see a lot of bad work, but my favorite examples also feature a very special element of absurdity. Here are some recent highlights:
Roland Juno 106 slider gasket / dust protectors set
One thing we find in almost every 1980s Roland we work on is crumbly, dirty “dust shields” or “dust protectors” on the sliders (aka faders) of the panel board. These gaskets were cut from thin black EVA foam sheets and were meant to protect the sliders from dust. However, 35 years later, they have dried out and are falling apart, their fragments actually falling into the sliders and making their crackly and intermittent behavior much worse.
I hate to have to tell you this but your Microwave 1 will always be noisy. Its low sample rate will make it always click because of waveform phases not lining up as it runs through the wavetables, and the DAC will always produce a high hum and a loud chirp when you turn it off. You should still recap the power supply though.
I did a post about this synth only to put this here: Here’s the Waldorf factory preset sound bank which I edited to convert it from a .mid file to .syx (System Exclusive) so you can dump it from MidiOx or SysEx librarian instead of grappling with timing the midi sequence correctly.
Note: this file is configured for a Waldorf MicroWave 1 with its device number set to 000. You should be able to send it to your MicroWave and have it load without doing anything to prepare your MicroWave to receive, but if it doesn’t work, check your device number (set via Device Param. menu).
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”