“I’ve worked on this synth myself and it’s completely at peak performance. It’s date stamped 1973 inside, which was the first year of its production, and it’s Roland’s first synthesizer, so it’s a piece of history!
When I got it, it was fully working but a few months later the divider chip failed. I replaced it with a New Old Stock chip I sourced from Japan, and I installed it with a plug receptacle, so if you ever need to access it again you can simply unplug and plug it, rather than de-solder/re-solder it. I don’t think you’ll ever need to mess with it again because it was replaced with an unused NOS chip, so I suspect it will last another 50 years or more. While I was going through it I cleaned all of the key contacts, which cleaned up a few notes that were double firing. It now works perfectly, as new.
I don’t think you’ll find a better example of this synth. It’s super vibe-y and the filter is magic. It has an early Low-Pass filter design, called a diode filter. These were only used for a year or two in the early 1970’s and they were replaced with cleaner designs, but there is something very special about the sound. When you push the resonance high you can hear the gnarly, gritty diode sound. And it’s more noticeable when the cutoff is higher, too. It’s much subtler when you have the resonance at more reasonable levels, or when you have the filter controlled by the ADSR envelope because the ADSR only pushes the cutoff up momentarily. Watch the first DEMO video (link above) on YouTube to hear it firsthand as I go through it.
It’s 37 keys, but there’s a L-M-H octave switch to add an octave on the top and bottom. It is a monophonic synth, so it’s meant for leads and basslines. It is killer for both!!”
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