Roland TB-303 Repairs and Midi kit fitting

This rather sick TB-303 landed on the workbench.



The internals were in pretty bad shape,



the control knobs were shot and the client also wanted a midi kit fited.



New control pots installed,



and a Sequentix MIDIBass 303 Mark II was fitted.

x0xb0x make over

Cast your mind back seven months and you may remember this post about some x0xb0x front panels by Substyler based on my "TB-x0x" custom x0xb0x.

Well now Substyler from x0xsh0p has made them into case kits which you can now purchase. The client for this job that arrived on my workbench bought one of these kits and asked that I fit it for him.

And so here we are with a couple of pictures of the unit before





Looking at the assembly instructions it was quite straight forward, some desoldering and drilling. Everything was going well until i noticed this,



The cable from the micro-controller to the I/O board was too short. The J7 cable was too short also so both had to be replaced, while not hard it does take quite a while to do.

After that was completed it was time to assemble the kit and drill out the selector knobs a little (these need to be done if the x0xb0x has the original greyhill encoders).

And so we have the finished unit.





Looks really nice don't you think? It's also nice to see that Substyler has taken my design to the next level. The kit was packaged together very nicely and the instructions were clear and concise.

Here's a video of the unit in action.

TR-606 Repairs

This unit arrived in very poor shape. The case was loose, it would power on but it was impossible to write programs in.

This machine had originally been modified and worked on by a well known circuit bender in the USA, I'll mention no names. They had added individual outputs and a replacement switchboard and frankly done a terrible job of it.

The client had sent the machine back to them several times without any success and eventually decided to send it here.



After disassembling the unit it was apparent how bad a job had been done. Connectors held on by glue? this was not a good sign.



The inside of the case had a lot of battery leakage also.







So it was time for a bath,



and some loving care to restore the unit back to it's former glory. (well except for the purple LEDs of course)

Macbeth M3X Repairs

Just a quick demonstration of a Macbeth M3X I just finished repairing.

Korg iMS-20 demo

Well here's another iPad demo, again I know its not my normal thing but I thought this app would be interesting for you also. This was released today and is currently on sale at 50% of normal price.

What you get is a software MS-20, SQ-10, a drum machine and a mixer. I guess its comparable to the DS-10 on the Nintendo DS.

I've worked on many MS-20's but never owned one, I've literally only had the software for a few minutes before doing the demo, so it's really just a first look and I'm obviously a little lost with it.

One thing I did test (which I'm sure most of you would be interested in) is the filter. It self resonates as expected but it does sound a little stair cased. I suppose this is to be expected with software, though I honestly don't understand why there isn't some form of slew to combat this.

Still it's quite fun to mess around with and certainly one of those apps to play around with on long trips.