Saw something I couldn’t resist on the auction this morning, a Korg KPR-77 in what looked like mint condition. The seller said in the listing that it was tested and ran fine on batteries but not with an adaptor. Ah what the hell it’s worth the risk. I bought it. Turns out the seller is located in Osaka city so after taking care of the payment I selected “come and get it” as the shipping option and sent a message asking if today was good. It was, so I went and got it. Here it is:

Ran fine on batteries, but HOLY FUCK IS THIS THING NOT EASY TO PROGRAM!!! Anyway after a brief look through the manual I figured it out and was grooving along in no time. Not the most remarkable sounding analog drum machine, but not the worst. I have a proper Korg 9v adapter too so I plugged that in and waddaya know it woiks. Hella cool. I also saw a detailed page online about hot rodding the thing for better sounds, so guess what I’ll be doing soon. Yeahhhhhhh!

Oddly enough, and coincidentally, this is one of the very few drum machines I have never seen in the wild. Strange. Now I have one. Funny how things work out.

Oh yeah, one more thing about the KPR-77. It has two little orangeish lamps nestled under the LCD that light up only when you press the LIGHT button. It wouldn’t be too hard to rig up a switch to turn the light on and have it stay on. I wonder how hard it would be to replace the wee lamps with LEDs... the lamps aren’t all that bright....

Board #2 looks a lot cleaner now! Haven't got any time currently to fix it once and for all but this is a start. Oh, and the op-amps arrived.