Vintage Korg BX-3 (Hammond clone) experience
Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2015 12:41 pmSo a while back I picked up an extremely rare (well I'd never seen one in the flesh) Korg BX-3 (the dual manual version of the CX-3). Having regretted selling my CX-3 a few years earlier, I was all over it.
When I got it there were a bunch of things not working, and not being in a position to test it thoroughly, I negotiated it down to next to nothing, in the knowledge that the big Siemens ICs are almost impossible to get, and depending on how many were kaput, I might be buying an enormous paperweight.
Anyway, the short story is that I sorted out most of the little issues, leaving me with just a bunch of notes on the upper manual that were dodgy - out of tune, distorted, weird crunchy noises when played together. I've actually been gigging with this beast and had just learned to avoid those notes! Anyway, I finally got around to pulling it apart to track down this fault, fully expecting it to be a dodgy SM304 (and thus resigning myself to never getting it fully operational!)
On pulling the first two ICs (in order to swap them round and seeing if the fault followed them), I found them to be very sticky, with a lot of black corrosion on the legs. Having stripped down two MCI tape machines in the past, and finding this to be a major cause of problems, I set about cleaning the pins with isopropyl and finishing with D5. I put them back in - and bingo, it's all good.
To be honest it may well have been the simple act of removal and re-insertion that fixed the issue (another lesson learned from my MCI machines!) Anyway I thought I'd just share this anecdote - in future it will be the first thing I do with synths/keyboards from this era!
This leaves me with just one issue that I've not been able to fix - no percussion on the lower manual. I'm tempted to live with the problem (percussion works fine on the top manual), especially as I need to put it back together shortly for it's next outing - but if anyone has experience with this issue and can give me any advice, that would be awesome.
The funny thing about the BX-3/CX-3 - i sold my first one after I bought a real hammond (T200) and didn't think it sounded 'real'' enough up against an actual hammond. But now I appreciate what it does, and through a leslie (or really good simulator like my Tube Rotosphere) it absolutely rocks!
When I got it there were a bunch of things not working, and not being in a position to test it thoroughly, I negotiated it down to next to nothing, in the knowledge that the big Siemens ICs are almost impossible to get, and depending on how many were kaput, I might be buying an enormous paperweight.
Anyway, the short story is that I sorted out most of the little issues, leaving me with just a bunch of notes on the upper manual that were dodgy - out of tune, distorted, weird crunchy noises when played together. I've actually been gigging with this beast and had just learned to avoid those notes! Anyway, I finally got around to pulling it apart to track down this fault, fully expecting it to be a dodgy SM304 (and thus resigning myself to never getting it fully operational!)
On pulling the first two ICs (in order to swap them round and seeing if the fault followed them), I found them to be very sticky, with a lot of black corrosion on the legs. Having stripped down two MCI tape machines in the past, and finding this to be a major cause of problems, I set about cleaning the pins with isopropyl and finishing with D5. I put them back in - and bingo, it's all good.
To be honest it may well have been the simple act of removal and re-insertion that fixed the issue (another lesson learned from my MCI machines!) Anyway I thought I'd just share this anecdote - in future it will be the first thing I do with synths/keyboards from this era!
This leaves me with just one issue that I've not been able to fix - no percussion on the lower manual. I'm tempted to live with the problem (percussion works fine on the top manual), especially as I need to put it back together shortly for it's next outing - but if anyone has experience with this issue and can give me any advice, that would be awesome.
The funny thing about the BX-3/CX-3 - i sold my first one after I bought a real hammond (T200) and didn't think it sounded 'real'' enough up against an actual hammond. But now I appreciate what it does, and through a leslie (or really good simulator like my Tube Rotosphere) it absolutely rocks!