Last weekend, I made a day and hit a bunch of pawn shops, specifically looking for keyboards. I guess collecting CDs was getting too hard, and collecting CD players was too infrequent, so keyboards is now what I collect. I had two a couple weeks ago, now I have five. I’ll figure out something.
So, to keep that story short, I made a deal at the first place I went and the rest of the day was pretty crappy. For some odd reason, my phone could not keep a GPS signal, so my trip was cut short. No idea what was up with the GPS, but I hope it’s not a regular happening.
So anyway, at this first shop, they had a keyboard out front – a Roland D70, which is a 76 key synth from 1990. Not bad. The original price was $720 and it was marked down to $450. ehhh, not that great. But there was a sign nearby that said anything on that table, make an offer. Hmmm. I did a quick price check and the D70 sells for about $500. Ok, let’s at least check it out.
I ask to try it and the first thing I see is that the MIDI thru jack is ripped out. I have no idea how something like that happens. Not a deal breaker because I wouldn’t need that port, but it is a negotiation point. It powers up and I start testing the keys. To my amazement, some of the keys don’t work. And when I say they don’t work, I don’t mean they don’t make a sound when you press them, I’m saying you could not physically push them down. Five keys had that problem, all black keys.
The store got a little busy right then, so I had an extended period to consider what level of effort a repair would be. Absolute worst case, find a dead donor board and swap the keybed. The electronics seemed fine, the issue was only mechanical. Time to barter.
Know this about me: I don’t haggle. I like to be a people-pleaser. I don’t like the discomfort of potentially insulting the person who is offering me a service or product. So I continually tell myself, I don’t need this board. There’s no reason not to walk away. I set my price at $250. Now remember, this is a pawn shop, so it’s likely the person pawning it only got like $100 at most for it, so my price is still giving them a profit. However, that price was lower than their lowest time-based discount price was.
The salesman came back and I explained the problem and the level of effort I’d have to take to see if it’s even repairable and told him I could only offer $250. He immediately said, no, I already have $400 into it. Well, that was quick. So I was like, ok, I can’t take it. But I can tell you there’s a repair shop nearby that could fix it for you if you want to get its full value. I know a pawn shop doesn’t want to sell good stuff; they want to turn over product with as little hassle as possible. Fuck, they don’t even clean things they put on the floor. Such a simple thing to increase the value, and they don’t.
He changes his tune quickly, "let me ask the manager." Yup, just like a car dealership. However, unlike a dealership, he came back and said, manager says he’ll take $250. I didn’t have to fight wave after wave of bosses to get the deal. So, deal done and back home to see what’s up with this thing.
To get to the point, this keyboard had what I’d heard about in repair videos but had never seen yet: the Roland Red Glue. This glue, in keyboards from 1985-1990, would melt in heat and humidity, loosening the key weights and running into the internals. The five broken black keys all had their weights fall and that is why they could not be pushed down. It’s quite funny to me to think that this board might have originally worked well, but because pawn shops suck, they might have left the A/C off at night to save a couple bucks and caused this problem all on their own. I love that sort of justice. But anyway, the problem was mine now.
I did some research and found that the usual fix is to soak the keys in drain cleaner to dissolve the red glue and then reattach the weights with epoxy glue. The recommendation was to use a drain cleaner with lye. Well, guess what, you can’t get that anymore. Why? Goddamn methheads. Lye is used in making meth. So I picked up some other cleaner that had some of the chemicals that are associated with lye and hoped that would do the job.
The keys soaked overnight and while it did appear to dissolve all the running glue and freed the weights from the five black keys that had their weights fall, the other key weights were still rock solid. Solid enough that I broke the plastic on a key trying to pry the weight out.
So the next day, I spent a lot of time scrubbing the keys, to get whatever glue was left (which had turned black) and planned my next move. In one video, the person said the glue was susceptible to high pH and tested his soaking solution before starting to show it was high pH. Well, I can make a high pH solution with some pool chemicals. So I took the broken key as my new sacrificial tester, bought some alkalinity increaser from the pool store, and soaked the key in a solution with a pH off the charts of my pool test strips. After a few hours, the key weight was as firmly attached as ever.
So at this point, I think I’m just going to fix the five black key weights, buy a replacement key for the one I broke, and put it all back together. Some part of me says it’s leaving a job unfinished, but another part of me is saying, those other key weights are on there. And I’m not leaving my keyboards in a non-climate controlled environment anyway, so they should remain solid. I dissolved all the excess glue that had seeped out, so the only glue left is what is behind the weight.
The replacement key arrived quicker than I expected. And immediately upon opening, I check it. Red Glue. Ok, off into a drain clearer bath overnight. The next day, I scrubbed the dissolved glue off and installed the key. I had been waiting for this and had installed every other key in advance. I put everything back together and powered the board up.
No sound. Further, the display was completely garbled. Actually, this is ok. I’ve heard that you might need to do a memory erase and then go through a tedious process of transmitting data to the device to restore it. So I download the data file, get the utility program and try. And try again, and again. We’re not seeing any success here. I read a couple more posts about the process and someone comments on turning off a memory protect switch. Oh yeah, that would help. A few more tries. More reading. Eventually what worked for me was navigating to a system menu, enabling sysex receive, and setting the device id to 17 (why I don’t know). But then I had sound.
Unfortunately, some of the keys weren’t responsive. I was too optimistic about their integrity and I probably shouldn’t have been. So, everything comes apart again and I disassemble the keybed completely again. Now I have to clean the membrane contacts and pads with alcohol, which wasn’t really as bad as I thought it might me. I put on some music and went at it. Two albums later, I was done and reassembling everything.
I had sound and now I had keys that work. Some of the black keys were more sensitive than others, but that’s livable. I can tweak any obnoxiously incorrect velocity in the sequencer if I need to. And that actually wraps up the repair and restore of this device.
In the meantime, I’m buying another keyboard next weekend, which might need some attention, and also the keyboard that started this buying frenzy, the Equinox, needs some care. The pitch wheel is wonky and I think some of the faders are dirty and spamming the bus. And I know the battery is low on that, too. So, no shortage of future projects, let’s hope they don’t become as involved as this one.
Farewell To Tweets
Since this is an unprecedented event in my time, I figured I’d at least record my thoughts on it to remember exactly what it was like. I am referring to the sudden, rapid implosion of Twitter. Since I’ve been a wordy motherfucker for decades, I obviously have no interest in Twitter. It never suited my purposes and I never "got" what it was trying to sell. So, this is clearly an outsider’s opinion.
Let’s start with my issues with the man behind the destruction. Elon "This isn’t even my final form" Musk has been insufferable for years now and this is just the latest deed. Fortunately, this is the one that pulls the curtain back on his actual lack of ability. A spoiled brat falling upwards until he now seems to have reached the ceiling. The only thing you can give him credit for is bankrolling other people’s ideas, like EV and space transportation. I don’t buy for a minute all the people who say, "he’s a genius. I’ve heard him talk and he knows his stuff." He only has a skill of regurgitating other people’s knowledge, which is also a skill of a huckster. He also has the self-important aura that makes him appear superior to others. It’s no wonder he is an authoritarian, it’s his trajectory.
One of the biggest, biggest things that pisses me off about the Twitter problem is that it didn’t have to be a problem. Everything Musk complains about is from his own doing. Losing $4m/day? It wasn’t before you got there. Overstaffed, unproductive workers, company costs too high? Wasn’t before you got there. If Musk had just been a slightly better person and not tried to do some obvious market manipulation, resulting in him being forced to make good on an offer that was only supposed to make him richer, Twitter might still be around.
Next in line for gripes is the complete foolishness of Musk’s "management" style. It’s not really management, it’s just barking orders. The whole idea of, "I am the single source of guidance and direction" is impossibly stupid in an organization. And as much as I hate to bring this other asshole into the conversation, it’s just like Trump being president. Businesses and governments are built on a hierarchy for a very good reason. It frees the people at the top from having to worry about the details, but authoritarians have to control every little detail. And it sucks for everyone involved because there is no consistency and the second in command remains as clueless as the commoner. Why even have a hierarchy then?
All of this superiority complex leads to the next point of stupidity. Walking in on day one and firing the people in charge, then firing half the staff before you even understand how the company operates, then threatening the remaining people with double the workload and no additional incentive – still before you understand how the company runs – then, once a large number of those remaining people have bowed out, finally asking to be clued in as to how things work. Any intelligent businessperson would spend months analyzing the system from the inside before making any changes. Musk is lucky any of the other companies he bought survived his leadership and managed to stay on their original track.
I feel like I could go on, but I want to address the now and future of Twitter the service.
So, pre-Musk (PM), Twitter had a real problem with the quality of its userbase. It had lots of harassment, incitement, and general bad behavior. But so does every other social media site out there. In that way, I am anti-social media in total. I don’t think it has proven to be a good mechanism for communication. The strengths it touts, allowing you to send off a quick message, as well as quickly reply in kind, are actually the wrong things to be promoting. Spur-of-the-moment, off-the-cuff, spontaneous messages, spoken without consideration, as well as knee-jerk, impulsive responses, are not a conversation. They are not anything but thoughts, and they lead to people doubling down and digging in on things they never should have said and can’t bring themselves to apologize for. So again, quick messages are not good.
However, when it comes to news and alerts, quick messages are great. And now a lot of governments and officials are wondering how they’re going to get the same effects after Twitter dies. And again, I’m going to say, Twitter is not good for this use case either. The problem I am focused on is that a lot of "alerts" are not internationally important or relevant. The ones that people are worried about: active shooter, natural disaster, policy changes – these are all regional. It does me no good to hear about an active shooter in CA when I’m across the country. As best it’s a distraction. And that’s the term I want to apply to Twitter broadly, it’s a distraction. It causes you to concern yourself with things that are not something you can do anything about and are not time sensitive. This is the problem the 24hr news cycle started and Twitter just turbocharged it. So, I feel that governments are going to go back to the way they used to issue alerts, which were more regional. Journalists that cover those regions will subscribe to those alerts and will amplify the message appropriately.
And I think what’s going to close up this post is the observation from someone who was there before the internet and seen how things got better and worse. While the internet has been invaluable for accessing information that is more of a static nature, it has been more of a detriment for more transient information. There’s lots of news that doesn’t need to be consumed right at the moment. Even big news, like the Queen is dead, could wait for the evening. That news doesn’t change what I am going to be doing for the day. Again, it’s a distraction. And I think the number of distractions we’re facing in a day is causing some serious societal harm. I feel like I’ve written about this before, where if you read about 10 rapes in the news in a day, they feel like they’re all in your neighborhood. The whole idea of being an interconnected world is not so appealing when you have to also bear the weight of the entire world’s problems.
It’s almost like we need some sort of hierarchical structure for news.