A customer recently brought in a Roland EP‑9 with several sticking keys. The culprit was the notorious red adhesive (affectionately known as “red goo”) that Roland used to secure the key weights in a number of 1990s keybeds. Over time, it can liquefy and migrate, jamming keys and contaminating the keybed. This isn’t unique to … Read more
I frequently receive requests from customers reporting that their keyboard or Nalbantov floppy disk emulator can’t read their USB stick. Usually, the issue is that the USB stick isn’t formatted correctly as a FAT32 device, or that it’s corrupt. I’ve created this guide to explain how to format your USB sticks in a manner that’s … Read more
If your keyboard sustains all the time when your foot is off the pedal, and then stops sustaining when you press it, you have the classic “reversed sustain” problem. The good news is that it’s almost always a setup/polarity mismatch and not a hardware failure. On many Yamaha instruments the pedal’s polarity (open/closed) is detected … Read more
I recently had a customer request I prepare replacement chips for his Roland R-880 and GC-8. I have the XGecu writer described below. I hope this is helpful to some intrepid individual or technician performing their own upgrade! A device to flash the memory chips, such as the XGecu T48 EPROM programmer. These are readily … Read more
Volume Slider Corrosion on Korg A customer reported that no sound was coming from his Korg Triton and that the volume slider had snapped off. Liquid had clearly been spilled directly onto the fader, but—fortunately—the corrosion was confined to the slider assembly itself. Be careful! Spilled drinks can severely damage keyboards. I regularly am repairing … Read more
A loudly clacking key might point to a common culprit: a cracked sub-chassis (or sub-frame). Roland used these plastic sub-chassis as a rib structure supporting sets of four or twelve keys inside the PHA-4 Concert keybed. The good news? Replacement parts are cheap, the job is fairly straightforward. What are the symptoms? The most common … Read more
My customer first mentioned that her KR-5000 had started “crackling.” By the time I showed up, every output—speakers and headphones alike—was dead, though all the buttons and sliders still behaved. Diagnosing the KR-5000 I popped a set of headphones into the headphone jack and heard nothing, which let me rule out blown speakers. Additionally, there … Read more
Last week a customer wrote in about his older, beloved Roland E-16 that had begun humming and would occasionally reboot. This was caused by a poor power adapter. As power adapters age, they can become unreliable, and often introduce humming or erratic behavior. I’ve put together a search tool for Roland power adapters, but I … Read more
When a customer asked me what power adapter they should buy for their Roland FP-90X, I figured it’d be a quick lookup. A few minutes later, I was elbow-deep in Roland service manuals, product listings with conflicting voltage specs. Some sellers offered “compatible” power supplies at both 9V and 12V. (There’s some incorrect information on … Read more
When it comes to digital piano repairs, especially on Yamaha’s P series models, one thing’s for sure—there are a lot of screws. To open the plastic shell of a Yamaha P series digital keyboard, there are no fewer than sixty screws. And it can easily reach down between the hammers to unscrew the keyboard assembly … Read more