Day 205 / Omnichord Repair And Jam

 

Last nights creative thing was thoroughly satisfying.

 

This Omnichord arrived at work for me yesterday.  I purchased it off Ebay a little while ago.  It was being sold as ‘not working’ because the previous owner had left the batteries in it and they got corroded and leaked.  
 
They were asking $99 for it.  On a random whim I decided to offer $50.00 for it and they accepted the next day.

 

After I made the offer I began to worry that maybe I wouldn’t be able to fix it.  I am really no electronics wizard and I had read of people going to radio shack for a replacement AC adaptor and then frying the circuit.

 

When I opened it up at work I was somewhat relieved to see that most of the damage was only around the battery area.  The circuit appeared to be clean and hopefully working.  I ran by the local electronics shop and picked up the battery holder you can see above.  I took out my clippers and cut out both sides of the battery holder.  I cleaned it up with some smaller clippers.

 

After a bit of filing, the two sides fit absolutely perfectly into the slots on the Omnichord.  I soldered the red to red and the black to black and powered it on.  Voila!  It worked!

 

I was so happy to see that it was working correctly.  I felt incredibly relieved  that I could report to Jenny that I made a deal and didn’t waste 50 bucks.

 

I decided to record a little of it and then play with the samples with my monome.  I chopped up the sample into a few loops and played around with them in MLR.  It was quite a pretty sample to play around with.

 

The video below is a little compilation of my mess around with the samples.

 

Enjoy!