KORG M1 Will not power up after Battery Replacement

[TreyF70]

Greetings, My Dad is a professional and musician and gave me his old Korg M1 because it doesn't work. Plugged it in and it turned on, but with error message that the battery was bad. So, I took it apart and it's under the motherboard is nothing more than a Sony CR2032 which I just happened to have. Energizer CR2032 and replaced it. Now it only seems to have 1 sound. (Shitty Piano) not regular Piano (HA) I am wondering if there is a way to restore the factory sounds without a CARD or Mini-USB computer transfer.

[email protected]

Thanks everyone.

[Yekuku]

Sorry there is no way, you have to either use a factory card or send the factory sysex via midi

[Worthy]

I am going through same issue myself at the moment. I actually changed the battery and powered it back up and it appeared to be fine. But I had it on a work bench so I unplugged it again, moved it to the desk area where I wanted to work with it and when I powered back up, only got a yellow/green bar of light across the screen and no actual text. Also the red lit buttons to the left side of screen no longer illuminated. With no way to call anything up, of course no sound as well.

I've found a couple of useful vids on Youtube - if you search Korg M1 repair there you can see what you need to do. Better than I try to explain it here. But very simply, you need to download a sysex app that allows you to communicate from computer to MIDI port, you need to go on Korg website and download the M1 sounds in their Customer Support page, and you probably need a MIDI to USB converter cable to communicate between the M1 and your computer.

With all that and if you follow the instructions it should be a fairly simple matter to get it all back to normal. I have a different problem in that I cannot get any info to or from the M1 in it's current state. So am here trying to find out if anyone has encountered this issue and perhaps can provide some advice. Good luck.

[synzoneau]

You can still get all the factory sounds for it from the official Korg site and use a program like MIDIOX to dump sysex back into the unit, this will restore all patches and combis. Most importantly you need to set the low level buffer size to something smaller than the default so that it slows the transmission down otherwise it won't work. You also have to make sure in the Korg M1 that sysex is turned on etc. Those steps are explained in those videos. Make sure your battery is changed first though. I've done this a few times now it's not a big hassle once you do it once.

[Worthy]

Thanks for that. I’m afraid my issue runs a little deeper than just a reconfig I do have the stuff to get it all back to factory form, but somewhere in the battery change exercise or just after I think some component got cooked. I only get a solid green highlight line across the entire screen now and no text - and none of the other toggles are lighting up at all. Seems frozen.

I’ve tried the factory reset with power switch to no avail and without a tech looking at it now I believe it’s going to be a large paper-weight for the foreseeable future. I am in Bali so getting help on this won’t be easy but I may be able to get it up to Jakarta for someone to service in the future. Fingers crossed.

Best,
Reg

[squatski]

have you tried
turning it off, and on again?

[Worthy]

have you tried
turning it off, and on again?

"I’ve tried the factory reset with power switch to no avail and ..."

[gx1]

Did you ever find out what was causing this?

[meatballfulton]

Are you having the same problem?

[gx1]

Yeah, synth hadn’t been used for some time so assumed battery dead and changed it, but problem still there. Only green screen, sometimes says ‘Korg M1 Wavestation’ but won’t boot any further. Reset the EPROMs and unplugged and replugged several of the cable looms but no help. Starting to think it’s a bad capacitor maybe. Reset doesn’t help.. Going to take the PSU board out and get it tested if I can.