Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
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Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
So your synth needs a tune up or repair and you crack open the case and are shocked to discover...?
I've only stumbled across your average earwig in a Siel DK80, or the equally shocking black goo in a Moog Opus 3. What ridiculous discoveries have you made on the insides of your vintage synths?
I've only stumbled across your average earwig in a Siel DK80, or the equally shocking black goo in a Moog Opus 3. What ridiculous discoveries have you made on the insides of your vintage synths?
Voyager XL*LittlePhatty*ElektronTrinity*ProOne*Mono/Poly*NordLead2X/3*Juno106*JX3P*JX10*JP8000*VirusKB*Blofeld*Ion*OctaveKitten*Polivoks*MS2000*AN1X*AlphaJuno1/2*ESQ1*SVC350*MG1*CS15*DX7II*etc...
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Re: Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
I found a couple of junebug carcasses in my OB 8. They must have been from the 80s as my OB was sitting in some guys basement in a road case since then. They were pretty big too.
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Re: Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
I had an SH-2 in the shop that had constant low level modulation of the pitch, that changed with humidity. It turned out to be voltage leakage caused by cat piss on the PCB.
- xpander
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Re: Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
i still have yet to deal with the black tar goo in my opus 3, too.
i pulled my Juno-106 out of a shed at a friend's parents' place in the santa cruz mountains. it had bugs living in it and some kind of flying insect's mud nest in a couple of the 1/4" jacks. cleaned & bought a roland power cable and i had myself a perfectly functional Juno-106 for the bargain price of FREE!
i pulled my Juno-106 out of a shed at a friend's parents' place in the santa cruz mountains. it had bugs living in it and some kind of flying insect's mud nest in a couple of the 1/4" jacks. cleaned & bought a roland power cable and i had myself a perfectly functional Juno-106 for the bargain price of FREE!

- griffin avid
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Re: Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
Isn't there a thread on here somewhere where some cat that repairs synths found mice nests and such.
Lots of puns followed...
Lots of puns followed...
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Re: Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
I've never found anything really bizarre in anything of mine, but some small, exoskeletal animal seems to have made a nest in a VFX at some point in its history.
"Sure that's fine in practice, but what about in theory?"
Some of my c**p
Some of my c**p
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Re: Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
I once opened my old JX3P after buying it second-hand and found what looks like thousands of beadcrumbs; a whole picnic worth of them. The vacuum-cleaner soon took care of them.
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Re: Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
I opened up my Korg Prophecy to fix a whobbly pitch bend wheel and found a guitar pick...nice one too! 

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Re: Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
Yup, had that experience. Found 2 mummified mouse carcasses and about a cup of mouse s**t in a synth I restored. The little bastards ate through all the loose wiring inside toogriffin avid wrote:Isn't there a thread on here somewhere where some cat that repairs synths found mice nests and such.
Lots of puns followed...
Last edited by Altitude on Tue Apr 07, 2009 3:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
Once I opened up my ol' Jupiter 4 and suddenly this guy jumps up and yells at me



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Re: Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
iirc i posted in a thread concerning asbestos in vintage synths...about mice bones.griffin avid wrote:Isn't there a thread on here somewhere where some cat that repairs synths found mice nests and such.
Lots of puns followed...
buying broken old synths to fix, the worst c**p seems to be dried beer/soda.
i bought a jx-10 that had lost the lowest 22 keys, leaving a big hole. i swear there was a bowl of dried oatmeal poured in there.....no, i did not taste it.
just opened a akai ax-80 and found three sharpened pencils.
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Re: Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
Kevin Lightner used to have a photograph on his Web site of a factory wrench that he found inside of, I think it was, a Juno-60.
Switches, knobs, buttons, LEDs, LCD screens, monitors, keys, mice, jacks, sockets. Now two joysticks!
- CapnMarvel
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Re: Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
Not synth-related but a true story - a friend of mine bought a Boogie Mark I amplifier off Craigslist and after bringing it home and noting it's unreasonable weight, opened it up.
He found the following:

and

Of course, he ended up turning them in to the police, much to the chagrin of some of our less reconstructed Texan pals.
He found the following:

and

Of course, he ended up turning them in to the police, much to the chagrin of some of our less reconstructed Texan pals.
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Re: Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
Last week I got an Ensoniq SQ-1 plus. When I opened it to change the battery, a screw and paper clip fell out. 

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Re: Strangest thing you ever found inside a synth
something that i wished was in my sh-2000 when it came back from a "friend", was its screws...
the synth looked in one piece, but when i got home. when i was going up the 2 floors stairway. i realized that my synth was falling apart. a dozen or so screws were missing. he got a phone call that night...
on an happy note, both samplers i bought were not suppose to have hdd inside...
the synth looked in one piece, but when i got home. when i was going up the 2 floors stairway. i realized that my synth was falling apart. a dozen or so screws were missing. he got a phone call that night...
on an happy note, both samplers i bought were not suppose to have hdd inside...
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