The Non-Hunt for Synth Parts

Yeah, I grabbed one of Yamaha’s forgotten vectors a while back for a good price.  The SY35 is a pretty sweet-sounding instrument that’s fun to program. I look forward to digging deep into its digital soul.

The unit I got had a couple of dead keys. I also noticed a couple of keys that were hyper-sensitive to velocity, i.e. they would always sound as though you struck them twice as hard as you actually did. So I took the keyboard apart and tried to clean the key contacts under the offending keys, which turned out to be a colossal waste of a lot of time. After a bit of research, I found that this keyboard mechanism is used on a lot of Yamaha keyboards including Continue reading →