BENCH NOTES

Welcome back to Bench Notes! 

This month marks the beginning of the summer - the time for travel, tours, and festivals! Before you pack up that gear, though, make sure it’ll survive your trip. In this month’s Bench Notes, we’ll share the common failures that can happen on the road, and what you can do to fix or prevent them.

GETTING TUNED UP FOR TOUR

Tour season is starting up again, so now is the perfect time to bring your work-horse in for a check-up! The last thing anyone wants is an on-stage technical difficulty, so any preventative measures you take before tour will give you some peace of mind.

Take a special look at:

• Input and output jacks: Either from bumps in the drive from town to town or handling during setup and teardown, the nuts that hold your synths’ jacks in place can come loose, resulting in an unstable connection. You can tighten your nuts with any appropriately sized socket wrench, but we prefer these Rocket Sockets by LoveMySwitches, as their plastic construction helps avoid marring the paint.

• Faders: Scratchy volume fades and filter sweeps can pull you and your audience right out of the moment. If any of your synth’s faders are easily accessible without opening it up, consider giving them a (very) gentle squirt of DeOxit F5 to clean and lubricate.

• Batteries: A lot of early digitally controlled synths use an internal battery to keep the RAM awake even when the power is off, keeping your presets alive. When these batteries die, so do your presets. In certain cases, some synths use lithium batteries, which can also leak, causing some nasty corrosion that can ruin circuit boards. So if you’re unsure, let us take a peek at its health! We keep a wide variety of fresh batteries in stock, and can install a specialized holder to make battery swaps quicker and easier. Also, back those presets up!!

• Cases: If your synth is living in a gig-bag, maybe consider upgrading to a road or flight case! Dents and dings can cause snapped pots, broken keys, and potentially some internal damage.

TAPE ECHO WOES

Check your heads!

Tape echoes are wondrous little units, but they need a good amount of care and attention to sound their best. Keep those tape heads clean with a dab of 99.9% isopropyl alcohol and a Q-tip. If that doesn't solve your tonal woes, get in touch!

If the tape is wrinkled, worn, or sticks to the heads, it very likely needs to be replaced. When we do tape replacements, we always take the opportunity to give the whole tape path a tune up, which includes cleaning the whole tape path, re-lubricating the pinch roller, demagnetizing the heads, and adjusting the height and angle of the tape tray and heads.

These little adjustments are often all tape echoes need to get back to their warm, ethereal goodness!

THE JUNK DRAWER

Some other tidbits from last month worth sharing:

• We were bestowed with over 50 pounds of 80's and 90's issues of Electronic Servicing & Technology magazine! With so many repair articles on Atari, VHS, microwaves and more, we have literal decades of catching up to do.

• A beautifully pristine 1972 white-panel ARP Odyssey left our shop featuring a complete set of brand new faders courtesy of SynthChaser! This fader upgrade kit was a breeze to install and truly set the clock back 50 years. 

• Our Employee of the Month award goes, yet again, to shop dog London! More like “top dog”, am I right?

LOCAL EVENTS

Synth and synth-adjacent happenings in the GTA.

Monday, June 10th | Toronto Electronic Music Open Mic

On the second Monday of each month, our friends at TEMOM hold an electronic music open mic night at Handlebar. 15 minute sets. All live. All musical styles. Drop by at 8pm and enjoy!

Wednesday, June 19th | Render File

You can often catch our talented tech Sam playing keys at Render File on Wednesdays. This live video game scoring group will be performing at this year’s Toronto Games Week Closing Celebration, scoring games by local developers throughout the event. Check it out at St Anne’s Parish Hall at 7pm!

Saturday, June 29th | Frequency Freaks

Frequency Freaks Synthesizer Workshops are free educational synth events that encourage sharing gear info and sound-design techniques in the Toronto synth community. This month’s event is shaping up to be an interesting panel on recording synthesizers - so if you’re still figuring out your setup, this might be a good event to hit. As always, Frequency Freaks is held in association with Arraymusic at 155 Walnut Avenue.

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Got any suggestions for local events we can add here? We’d love to hear about them! Just reach out and let us know.

If you made it this far, thanks so much for reading Bench Notes! Feel free to let us know what you think, share it with a friend, or suggest new topics you’re curious about.

—The Team at Synths When