Photo courtesy of oskay
March 23rd, 2009 – Recently, I wanted to play my beloved Korg Triton (I love the key action on it) but it wouldn’t turn on. For quite a while (ie. several years), I have been having problems with the AC plug on the back of the keyboard; I would have to jostle the cord to get any power. I suppose that the last time I jostled it, I snapped the connection inside the keyboard.
I’m pretty sure the power supply is the culprit, so while I’ve been putting off resoldering the connection (due to my persistent procrastination), I’m tired of manually mapping notes and chords in a piano roll matrix. I’m not the most skillful at soldering, but I have made a DI guitar box (although I’ve never actually tried it to see if it sounds any good).
If you don’t know how to solder, it’s a pretty important skill to have and it doesn’t take much to get a passable amount of chops. Even if you aren’t making your own musical instruments, soldering is useful in situations where you need to fix something and you know what the problem is (like the power supply in my Korg), or if you need to make simple things like your own cables. Cables are so horrendously overpriced; you can save so much by making your own.
Linked below is a pretty useful soldering primer for the beginner. If you’ve never soldered before, you’ll need the guide to make your own MIDI controller.
Update 3-23-09 : After fiddling with the layout for a while, DimensionZero was able to figure out that I had messed up some HTML tags. Thanks Ken! And now back to our regular programming…
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