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mysynthfetish · 5 years ago

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Moronavirus!

Just to be totally up front and honest with y’all, I gotta let you know that personally, I’m rooting for the coronavirus at this point. As a pal posted on Facebutt: “China virus will not kill anywhere near enough people to raise the average IQ of the planet.” I have to say I agree. Best of luck to you and yours, on with the synthing!

Impulse buy that I pretty much immediately regretted. I have a soft spot for string machines. I had a Korg Lambda a few years back. Probably shouldn’t have sold it. But I did. Saw the SK-15 for $100 on the auction and thought yeah why not? Not the worst sound by far, but given I’ll hardly use the organ section, and the synth section is almost as bare-bones as you can get, well, yeah it’s already sold. Seriously I think I had it a grand total of two and a half weeks if that. It’s in great shape cosmetically, and came with the flight case, but some of the buttons were stubborn so I thought I’d desolder them, disassemble and repair whatever needed repairing. Here’s what one of the ginormous button assemblies looks like:

Popped the business end off. And here’s one desoldered and discombobulated:

Standard tact switch right there bottom row, center. It was a quick job to swap the old ones out, but anyone out there wanting to do this needs to be sure to replace the switches with ALPS SKHCBFA010 as opposed to the better, sealed Omron switches because of this:

Look carefully and closely at the corners. At lower left you can see a 45 there yeah? Those indentations are what wee clips on the underside of the big button housing snap into. Omron tact switches don’t have those. Also, that white cardboard square plastered on serves a purpose, it ensures that the switch stays a certain height off the PCB. So you’ll need to carefully pry those off and stick ‘em on the replacement switches (double sided tape did the trick). After they were all done, two were still acting up. As far as I could tell, it was due to the way the LED sorta snaps into place, almost like the snap gets in the way and doesn’t let the moving part of the switch housing to return to its original position. If I had more time (and ambition) I would’ve probably given the inner part a light sanding on the sides that contact the outer housing, and that may have opened up just enough leeway for the switch to move more freely. But I didn’t. I did replace the dirty felt-like strips that surround the sliders, and where the hinged front panel rests on the keys, and that looks nice. Kind of a lot of elbow grease and TLC for something that spent so little time here. I do like to see things off in better shape than when I got them though.

It’s MFB Mofuggin’ Mania!! Feast your bezoomny grahzny glazzies on that horrorshow chellovek, O droogs. KRAFTZWERG!!! The Power Dwarf!!! Basically it’s the guttiwuts of the Synth 2 (which you can see there too), but with no memory, no sequencer, no “keyboard,” instead you get patch points. This thing sounds fat as fuck. Patching stuff on the KRAFTZWERG is like if you fed the Synth 2 a big batch of LSD. Madness!! I’m seriously thinking of selling the Polivoks now. Yes, it’s THAT good. The Polivoks filter is a whole different kind of insanity, but otherwise it’s a pretty sterile but very good sounding synth (only one LFO, no PWM, no bender or mod wheel) though the looping envelope bit is very appealing. Hmmmmm. Anyway, KRAFTZWERG!!!!!!!

And the latest in the MFB bunch is the Tänzbar Lite. Basically an MFB-522 with (drum roll please) maybe a few more sounds, less noise, a set of LFOs, and PARAMETER LOCKS!!! Yeah I totally wasn’t expecting that. I have an MFB-503 and that one saves the sound settings per pattern, which is a fantastic feature, but the Tänzbar Lite takes it a step further with parameter locks. The big drawback with it is the learning curve, and havibg to get used to some very counter-intuitive button press combos (you have to hold shift+play to start and stop the onboard sequencer....why it’s like this is anybody’s guess). Anyhow I’ve been using a Drumbrute Impact for a little while now, and while I LOVE the sequencer and I do like the general sound, I find the bass drum a bit flabby when the decay is cranked, and the snare almost totally lacks any punch at all (remedied with individual output and processing but that requires extra braincells, cables, and devices, and I just wanna get shit done already). And of course, no parameter locks, and no saving of sound settings per pattern (or at all really, it’s in perpetual “Manual” mode). So yeah, see ya later Drumbrute Impact. MFB for me. I’ve got one more special guest showing up this weekend, so keep a lookout for a new post soon. Until then, be well, but don’t be afraid to die. Worse things can happen.

#fucktrump #satan #diy synth repair #aaaargh #mfb tanzbar lite #yamaha sk15 #mfb kraftzwerg #madness #gogocoronavirus

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