As promised, here’s the hard-to-find manual for Yamaha’s last Vector synth.
Yamaha sent it to me as 4 separate PDFs (Service Manual, MIDI Implementation, Parts List, Expanded big PCB pages), plus a monster-sized TIFF of the schematic. They didn’t want anything for it, and they didn’t ask any questions. I assembled the files into a single PDF, then used the the web-based Compress PDF to reduce the file size (to 6.5 MB, down from about 12 MB).
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