When my friend picked up his synthesizers, he left the Roland Juno-60 of a deceased band member at my place so I can maintain it as well. The widow of my friend's mate was planning to sell it and he recommended me for refurbishing it.
For those who aren't familiar with vintage synthesizers: the Juno-60 has once been one of the "bread and butter" instruments of the '80s and it was regular sold for around 400 EUR in the early 2000s, but it has enormously risen in value in the last 20 years. A quite recent song, "Blinding Lights", is featuring this certain synthesizer for the hook, plus it was used on numerous albums and pop hits in the '80s and then in lots of the house and techno tracks in the '90s. Now the prices are around 3,500 EUR and more, depending on the technical state.
Now this synthesizer arrived at my place in a really bad shape and I have my doubts that it had fetched a price of over 2,000 EUR in this poor condition. Nearly no fader or switch worked without crackling noise. Almost all of the key contacts were causing intermittent sound, some of them were non-functional. And everything was dirty, dirty, dirty. You can only really see it in the close-up pictures. If you click on them, a picture in higher resolution will open.
This was the overall state: everything was full of dust and dirt, lots of the fader axes heavily bent, the HPF fader cap was missing.
Everything was covered with dust and hairs and dirt. The labellings of the ICs were almost unreadable.
In this picture you can see how dirty the coloured knobs really were. Yuck!
A last awful close-up shot. This was definitely one of the dirtiest keyboards that I had the "pleasure" to clean.
Before:
After:
I put dozens of hours of work into this instrument and now every function works like on the first day.
The keys are polished, plus they are working perfectly again, because I learned how to properly clean oxidized key contacts of this type.
All the parts were disassembled and cleaned and every function was successfully tested, including all of the jacks on the back.
Since it is a synth with digitally controlled oscillators, no real calibration was needed. The envelopes, etc. were all still good, only the Bender needed a slight calibration for a maximum value of perfect 5ths. Everything is in great shape again and it is a pure joy to fiddle around with it. This synth has always been regarded as a pure sweet spot. And I do agree that you cannot really create "bad" sounds with it. The lush chorus is also legendary (that's why there exists a TC Electronic pedal version of it).
After Christmas I am going to show you what was the reimbursement for my work.
