[sdiy] Roland TR mods

[Brett Maddaford]

Heya Bart

With the 707 626 and 505 type boxes you are talking about circuit
bending here and not mods technically. I've modded a tr505 with 24
banana jacks in a break out box and it is very cool. 
Most of the mods came from the larger ic that I think hold all the
samples etc.....the 707 and 626 are very much the same in that they have
one or two large ic's that are full of good bend points. 
I just used a couple of alligator clips joined with a wire and clipped
onto a pair of those litle jewlers screwdrivers and with a sequence
running just connected pins on the chip until I found some interesting
sounding bends and noted them down (or if you take the pcb out at any
point throw it on a scanner and print the scan then you can just mark
them) I then wired all those points induvidually to the jacks so I can
patch them in any number of ways. Don't just stick to the big ic though
experiment as some of the other ic's and even resistors and wire links
can also do weird stuff when connected to the ic pins as well ;)
Just solder the wires to the jacks to the pins on the back of the pcb
once you've found what you like, tin the wires first and then just use a
bit of heat to melt the existing solder and the tinning on the wires
together, its real easy.The 505 now is crunchy as hell and even will
loop etc with some bends and has only ever crashed once. Using jacks
also mean that with nothing plugged into them the machine plays as
normal.

The 606 is analog however and you can you proper mods etc with it and
isnt really the kind of thing you would just randomly connect points to
points to see what happens. Use google there are lots of sites with lots
of info on bends, I collected all I could and am in the middle of
putting the mods I liked onto a machine for rack mounting etc....lets
just say I found so many I had to pick and choose what I liked or else
it would be huge!

Cya
Brett

-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Bisset [mailto:abisset at dspaudio.com] 
Sent: Thursday, 29 September 2005 7:40 PM
To: Bart Provoost
Cc: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
Subject: Re: [sdiy] Roland TR mods


for a start, try
http://www.confusedmachines.com/

List member Julian is also doing mods for people on request.  His stuff
goes a bit further than what's been documented on the web.

-a

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Bart Provoost wrote:

> Hi,
>  Does anyone have some documentation about drum machine mods?  I have 
> some TR-626's, a TR-707 and a TR-727 and would like to mod some of 
> them. Some information about interesting connections etc. would be 
> very welcome, I don't want to miss great sounds or damage the 
> instrument :)  I also have a TR-606 but I already added the Analogue 
> Solutions kit for separate outs and the sound mods (very 
> disappointing, it seems like only the "original" settings are usefull 
> sounds, other settings just give very weak sounds). If there's 
> something else to do with the TR-606 then I'm also interested.  
> Thanks!
>   Bart
> --
> http://filters.muziq.be
> need... more... filters...
>