Only You Yazoo Midi

[Daisy Hughlett]

Idecided to fix this! I had a company re-manufacture the aluminum cap to the exact original dimensions. (I also looked into making the plastic knob part, but then I realized most people already have these and they usually look ok).

Now, only the more high end SCI gear (Prophet-5, Prophet-10 etc) had the fancy knobs with aluminum caps. The more low end stuff (Pro-One, Prophet-600, Split-Eight etc) only had the plastic part of the knob, with a simple painted white indicator line. The best part is that now you can pimp these models too! Many vintage (80s) Sequential Circuits gear used the same plastic knobs, with this cap being the only difference. The T8 and some other machines used different wider and shorter knobs, and unfortunately my caps will not fit those.

The pic below shows two old Prophet-5 knobs, one with a silver cap, the other with a removed black cap. Next to those a Pro-One knob. And in the bottom right corner: old knobs given a second life with my new caps!

I came up with a pretty clever solution if I may say so myself: I fastened the spacer to an old transformer (the one I replaced in the Pro-One).

This gave me the needed weight AND a straight angle.

There is (was?) a company called synthwood who sells kits to make your synths more woody and nice. They seem to have gone out of business now, and people seem to have different opinions on the quality of these kits. Anyway, I though this Pro-One case was pretty awesome. Thinking about if I could do something similar..

The CV connections

The remaining 5 pin connector is for the wires with CV signals going from the MIDI board and back to the main PCB (for pitch bend, filter control etc over MIDI).

I replaced it with a toroid, which is supposedly better for audio applications. I also ditched the 110/220 voltage selector, and installed a standard IEC power cable chassis connector so I could ditch the annoying and potentially dangerous permanent power cord.

I measured the voltage once more to be sure everything was ok, and it seemed fine: around 20V on each pin against the middle tap/ground and 40 V between the two pins in the white connector. (The transformer is a 2*18V 30 VA model)

No. Syntaur is selling Pro-One replacement transformers that are only 12 VA! I guess Sequential got a good deal on these bigger ones and just used them.Considering that the first 1500 Pro-Ones had a small transformer mounted on the PCB, there is no way that was a 56 VA model. The voltage regulators on the PCB also have very little heat sinking, and a seasoned tech told me the currents were then probably close to 200 mA or so. My 30 VA model can deliver 830 mA. So even that is bigger than needed.

Replacing old capacitors is something people do with old synths, mixers, amps etc. Some people swear by it, other say it is often a lot of mumbo jumbo, especially if the claim is that the audio quality got much better.

When googling around for replacement keybeds and MIDI kits, I stumbled upon Music Technologies Group. The guy who runs the show, Grant, makes a replacement CPU board for the Pro-One, as well as a MIDI kit. Great!

In his blog he also posted how he replaced the original Pro-One keybed with a modern one from Doepfer. The keybed inside is made by the Italian company Fatar, and it works pretty much the same as the original Pro-One keybed. All that is needed is some wiring and connector tweaks:

MTG Blog post about Pro-One keyboard replacement

In the comment section of that post other people describe doing the same thing, using keybeds from gutted StudioLogic CMK-137 midi keyboards, which has similar Fatar keybeds inside. A LOT of manufacturers (Doepfer, Novation, Access etc) use Fatar keybeds, they are pretty much the industry standard unless you are Roland or Yamaha.

After some head scratching I took a look at the small MIDI board that I had discarded (but not thrown away) and noticed that there were connections between all the even numbered pins on the two connectors. Pin 2 on connector A was connected to pin 2 on connector B. Pin 4 to Pin 4. And so on.

Up until this point I had just had the flat cables hanging loose with the stripped individual wires flying around, and it was just too fiddly. I decided to order a circuit experiment board so I could solder down the flat cables. This would certainly make everything tidier and make measuring a lot easier.

Great success! I only had enough test cables to get 5 of the 8 keys in each octave working, but figured if I had it right this far, the rest should work as well. I removed the test cables and started soldering permanent cables.

Mounting the new keybed inside the Pro-One

I mounted some wood rails under the Fatar keybed using the existing screw holes:

I then placed the keybed in the Pro-One, put the lid on, and aligned the keybed. I then carefully removed the lid, and drew markings around the wood rails on the Pro-One bottom plate. Then removed the keybed and made marks where I wanted to drill 6 holes (being careful to avoid the existing screws in the wood):

After drilling the holes in the bottom plate I put back the keybed, and put the lid on again. I put back the front screws to make sure it was in the correct position.

I was playing with the old Yazoo soundfont I had made, and decided to code the complete song Don't Go (I only did a smallportion of it in the medley midi file with the original soundfont). I add a few new samples and surprisingly the final font is under half a megabyte in size.It contains a few synths, drums and vocals.

This is an old soundfont that I've had for ages and never got finished until now. It contains several Art Of Noise samples of guitars, vocals, brass and drums. The soundfont has been updated to remove the ROM samples used in the original organ sound. A new organ instrument has been included. Thanks to Andrew M for pointing this out to me.

This font is similar to the 'Eat My Goal' Soundfont in that it uses sampled loops from the track. To keep the file size down the track is an instrument with only one sung phrase.If I was to add the vocals the file size would have doubled at least. At the time of creation this track has been at the top of the UK charts for five weeks, and has been number one in several other countries as well.

It's taken a while to create this font, as I've put all the vocals in (like the combined Beats International soundfonts). It contains a bass, synth, drum set and vocals from the 1983 hit single, which reached number 2 in June of that year in the U.K. charts.

I was listening to a compilation album of seventies hits, when I heard this track and thought I could do a soundfont. The single was number one for three weeks in February 1972. The font contains a bass guitar, bass synth, synth and stylophone (I actually sampled a real Stylophone, but couldn't get the sound I was after, so I used a saw wave sample instead!).

This track by T.I.M. uses samples from Volume One of the Future Music sample CD, namely a vocal sample, bass line, bass synth and synth sound. It's a short piece, and a version can be heard on my History of My Music Creation page.

This track by T.I.M. uses samples from the Future Beat 3D program, and Farscape. I had some Farscape samples to use in a executable version of the quiz that appears on one of the DVDs, and I thought I would add them to the mix. Drums, bass (a rhodes piano!), synths, samples and a few loops.

This is an updated version of my previous CZ101 Synth soundfont. It now contains all the preset sounds, plus several internal cartridge sounds. There are 35 basic instruments, 35 stereo enhanced versions of the same sounds, plus 10 tweaked variations. The download size is only slightly larger, but the soundfont itself has grown from 2Mb to nearly 5Mb.

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