Well, my invisible droogies, it was Xmas in March, me brothers. You see, my Belarusian pal Egor, out of the bloody sincere kindness of his heart, shipped me a goddam Alisa 1387. FOR FREE! I offered to at least pay for shipping (no idea how I’d have done that though, as PayPal doesn’t seem to allow sending money to Belarus last time I checked, maybe it’s different now) but nope. I mean WHO DOES THIS KINDA STUFF?! In this day and age of Drumpf and Breggzit and Me First, Fuck You! Duuuude. Egor, I really appreciate it!!!!!!!
Not in the best (or worst) shape. But the lass is in need of some serious refurbishment. As you can see in the photo above, a number of switches were broken and missing their buttons. But Egor sent me a box of extra knobs, buttons and switches!!!! Goddam man! I owe you, for real. Anyway, I had no idea where I was even gonna start, because before he sent it he provided me a long list of ailments the poor thing is suffering from: “Keyboard is really buggy to not working so I couldn’t get envelopes to work, osc1 is working but something wrong with triangle additional wave shaping, PWM works. Osc2 sounds too low so I think there something with capacitors there. On output only pulse, so need to check triangle waveshaper also. LFO works. Filter works but pots everywhere are almost dead, they need careful cleaning and resoldering. So a great amount of work is needed with it not only soldering but also work with hardware refurbish. Do you still need it?” Bwaahahahahahaha!! I said “yeah!” And so, here we are. First thing I decided to unfuck was this:
WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS?!?! I had the same deal on a DW-8000 I just flipped here a month or two ago. But that’s not it, ohhhhh no, it was even scarier on the inside!!!!
The wires were being held together with scotch tape!!!?? Fucking Holy Electrocution By A Russian Synth, Batman! I wanna just yank the socket and put a standard jobby in but the frame is damn near 2mm thick, and it’s fucking STEEL, so cutting/filing is Not Going To Be An Easy Job, so I’m still on the fence as to how to remedy the Power Cable Connector Conundrum.
Next job was replacing all the electrolytic capacitors. Not a super hard job, but I started noticing that the values of components on the schematics and those in the actual synth in front of me did not match. That, and what looked like a polarized electrolytic on the schemo was in fact a Gifuckingnormous mylar or in some cases poly cap. What?! Jeez. And then I found this:
Milk carton time. Have You Seen Me? MISSING CAPACITOR! I was like, you have gotta be shitting me. And the fucker wasn’t rattling around loose inside the synth either!? And there are vacant areas on the Generator 1 (VCO1) daughterboard where the schematic shows capacitors should be. What, they run out at the factory and just decide “fugg eet, no capahceetorz for you, comrade synth!” or what? And that ain’t all the shenanigans going on with that board either! Get a load of this!
What the Jumping Fuck On A Stick is this Soviet Spaghetti here?!?! Flying resistors tied together with a goddam chunky diode thrown in for WHO THE FUCK KNOWS WHY!!??!? All I could do was shake my head. After some minutes of being rendered absolutely speechless had passed, I cleaned the menagerie of components up, just reflowing solder and nudging stuff closer to the board, really. But what the hell is up with this? Seriously if anyone out there has ideas, I am all ears!
I gave up on that board for the time being and then went about replacing all the switches that had their business ends broken off. Egor kindly supplied me with more than enough of the same type switches he got from Bog Knows Where. They all work now (mechanically anyway). The hardest thing was the Generator 1 Waveform Selector Assembly, as it has three switches that are mechanically interlinked, so when you press a new one down, the currently pressed down one will pop up—meaning only one selection can be made at a time. I uncovered the secrets of the inner workings of the assembly after desoldering the three switches and removing the whole shebang. I also discovered that the switch actuators themselves are different, as you can see below:
On the right, with bee-you-tee-full blue base, is an original switch from that assembly. On the left, a typical (standard?) switch. Same electrical connections and pinout (check out those legs! and on both sides too!!) so whatever. The actuators in front are broken ones from two of the three blue switches (I was letting them set after carefully superglueing them back together). See how they have little grooves in them? Those are there to slide a spring-loaded metal inner-faceplate along that then forces the other switches up when you press one down. Anyway, I swapped the blue ones out with the all-brown ones, so maybe if I get the Generator board working again, it’ll be possible to engage more than one waveform at a time. I’ve read reviews of this synth that say doing just that is possible, so I dunno what gives.
After some general cleaning and reflowing of sketchy looking solder, I was ready to plug it in to my step-up transformer and duck for cover. No explosions or smoke or arcs of unbridled electricity occured, thankfully. Oh I forgot to mention I replaced the 5-pin DIN main out with a standard 1/4” jack. Yeah. So I turned it on, the power LED came on, and the LFO LED lit up and cycled on and off properly, and the speed changed accordingly when I twiddled the speed knob so that was reassuring. But, no sound and no response from any key, period. I could make the LFO send the filter into near self-oscillation, but even that was super, super quiet. Nothing happened when I raised or lowered the Gen 1, Gen 2 or Noise knobs in the Mixer section. Oh well. Kind of a big let down. But I knew what I was in for when I started all this. In any case, I dunno where or how I’m gonna start troubleshooting this thing. OH and I found a loose wire too! One side is soldered to the switch in the LFO section that selects filter or Generator as the LFO’s destination. No idea where the other end belongs soldered up to. The schematics aren’t as easy to decipher as those of the Polivoks either, so there’s that to deal with too. In any case, I don’t expect I’ll have her up and running again all that soon. And as I said before, anyone out there with experience refurbing/resurrecting an Alisa 1387, feel free to chime in, as I’d really appreciate it!
