Tuesday, January 8, 2013

606 rescued

A friend of a friend had me repair his 606. The Bassdrum was not working, and someone added some nonfunctional modifications, which were executed rather crudely. I mean, if you are about to drill holes in an enclosure, at least make sure they line up properly! All in all, the machine was in a really bad shape. It could not even be programmed properly, because most of the switches were bouncing or not reacting at all.
After getting the Bassdrum working, I took out the existing mods and added some of my own: in the top left is BD pitch, top right are snare pitch, snare snappy and snare decay. Because of the aforementioned misaligned holes I put a piece of black plastic under the knobs as sort of a cover up. 
To round it all off I installed a Technology Transplant replacement switchboard and replacement volume pots. Beware! The Technology Transplant kit is not exactly living up to its expectations: the switches on it are definitely NOT new, as they had solder residue all over them, and on two of them even one of the four legs were broken off! Also they, too, were badly aligned, which means that when I put the switchcaps on them and assembled the 606, lots of the keys got stuck in the enclosure because there was not enough tolerance. I had to resolder at least half of the switches.
Anyhow, the 606 is working beautifully now, the owner is happy, so am I. Bumblebee.

1 comment:

Al said...

hello, in the 606, is there a possibility to trim the snare's sound (without resoldering etc.) - is there a snappy or decay trimmer for example? how can I make it sound more dry? (I compared two 606's and e.g. their snares sound remarkably different from each other, one is nicely dry, the other not) thank you