{"id":125,"date":"2009-08-18T14:11:14","date_gmt":"2009-08-18T19:11:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dollfactory.org\/?p=125"},"modified":"2009-08-21T18:35:17","modified_gmt":"2009-08-21T23:35:17","slug":"zen-and-the-art-of-synthesizer-maintenance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dollfactory.org\/?p=125","title":{"rendered":"Zen and the art of synthesizer maintenance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"chopshop\"“Working on music equipment” counts as “working on music”, right?<\/p>\n

Whomever designs certain models of Line 6 “Variax” guitars is a sadist, an engineering genius, or both. You have to remove the neck to partially remove the pickguard to carefully disconnect several snap-on ribbon-cable-style connectors to finish removing the pickguard to access the electronics – you can’t remove the pickguard all<\/em> the way until you disconnect the ribbon cables; you have to hold it “hovering” about an inch from the body while doing so, as the cables aren’t long enough, and aren’t kindly placed all along just one<\/em> side, which would allow one to ‘flip the lid’ like you can on a (well designed) synth.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then you have to fish another little red-and-black-means-power cable with snap-on connector through a metal shielding cage and back with tweezers. Tweezers<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Two guitars field-disassembled, repaired, and reassembled: check. Akai AX-60 repaired: check. Juno-106 repaired: negative. Got the thing opened up and the board with the voice and problematic VCF-VCA ICs pulled, but ran out of time before getting all the chips desoldered and pulled for the “soak your 80017a’s in acetone to strip the resin<\/u><\/a>” trick that’s all the rage these days. So it may be be a week or two before I find out if I’ve fixed the thing, or destroyed it. Roland SH-09 key contacts cleaned: rescheduled for a later date.<\/p>\n

At least I was able to swap the stock pickguards between the two to arrive at much-improved “black ‘n white” and “black ‘n red”, which in some imaginary, alternate universe gains some<\/em> sort of “cred” for making my to-hell-with-the-purists “what the hell are you doing using that clearance-bin fake digital guitar, boy? You say that thing hooks up to a computer?<\/em>” bits of glorified kindling look a bit more like old Melody Maker and Duo Jet color schemes to the undiscerning, non-guitar-wanker eye. Because being a proper indie-post-punk-hipster-whatever is all about<\/em> caring very much about pretending not to care. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Working on music equipment” counts as “working on music”, right? Whomever designs certain models of Line 6 “Variax” guitars is a sadist, an engineering genius, or both. You have to remove the neck to partially remove the pickguard to carefully disconnect several snap-on ribbon-cable-style connectors to finish removing the pickguard to access the electronics – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-studioblog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dollfactory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dollfactory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dollfactory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dollfactory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dollfactory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/dollfactory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":171,"href":"https:\/\/dollfactory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions\/171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dollfactory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dollfactory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dollfactory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}