It’s a terrible feeling – to turn on your favorite synth, and instead of watching it gleefully come to life, you get…nothing.  No lights, no display, no sound.  Nothing. It sounds like the worst problem a synth could have – nothing works!  But in reality, it could be a simple fix, if you are armed ..read more

The heart and soul of a synthesizer is its main board, the place where the nitty-gritty happens, where the most basic and the most important functions take place. If your synth turns on but the display shows weirdness, or if it boots up but gets stuck on one screen, or freezes up in the middle of your song, these are the sorts of things that can indicate that the main board – sometimes called the mother board – is faulty. Repairing a non-working main board is not for the faint of heart. It requires an experienced tech with diagnostic tools to determine that this one chip amongst hundreds has f ..read more

One of the most common problems with electronic keyboards is keys that don’t respond the way they should. Perhaps one or more notes don’t sound at all, or a note plays sporadically. Or the most telling symptom: a note that always plays at full volume no matter how hard you press the key. These are all symptoms of dirty or worn out contact strips, the rubber strips that span the keyboard on most synthesizers. And the good news is that repairing these issues is not difficult, not very expensive, and is a great first project for anyone wanting to try their skills at synth repair. To determine if ..read more

It’s no secret that the Roland Juno-106 is a great analog synth – and that the proprietary voice chips are it’s Achilles heel.  These chips – one for each of the Juno’s six voices – were dipped in an epoxy coating when they were made back in the early 1980’s.  And decades later, it turns out that that epoxy starts becoming conductive as it ages.  A conductive coating on an electrical circuit = Not Good. The fix is pretty straightforward, though you’ll want an experienced tech to handle the repair.  Because the problem is so common, Analogue Renaissance has remanufactured th ..read more