Yay! I've had been having mad fun tonight! First serious sketch on my SP-12, enjoy and please feel free to leave a comment!

Finally there goes my SP-12 again! I bought this thing on ebay and after it arrived i was thoroughly checking it´s functions for three days. All good and so there was no hesitation on giving 100% positive feedback to the seller. So when the test were done i was working on some beat the other day and out of nothing i couldn't read a thing on the display anymore. The backlight was on, but that was it. Some knocking on the machine helped and i thought it was some soldering point that got lose. First I did not want to get my own hands on the machine, so i brought the SP to some repair dude here in Hannover. Burana works was the place and i gave the guy a written description of the problem. He called me back 2 days later, telling me he did the work i asked him for, but that the display contacts weren't the problem. I picked it right up again and decided that i take a look at it on my own. Opened the machine and there it was: The 14 Pin Cable on the display broke right over some contacts. So i got a friend who was good at soldering to help me and we changed the whole cable. It took us until 4 o'clock in the morning but we were sure having it done. Assembled the machine and guess what: Error! Teh whole machine now froze and the display wasn't working either. After this i was really afraid of having broken the board of the SP and then sent it to Studiorepair in Bad Homburg. I was lucky and Nikolaus Riehm te guy operating studio repair already had an SP-1200 for repairs in his shop so he could cross-check on the machines. After checking both my new display that i ordered from ebay (hard to get these days) and the old one, he assumed that both of them were broke. He then tried one of my displays in the SP-1200 where it worked just fine. After metering the pins on my SP-12 and comparing it to the SP-1200 he found out that the voltage on one of the SP-12 display pins was much higher than on the SP-1200. He tracked back the signal and voila it was the resistor on that circuit whose foot came of from the board. Turned out that this particular resistor was responsible for the dimming and since it didn't dim the voltage the display was working at full glow which made it impossible to see anything. My god was i happy that it wasn't something serious. Niko then fixed my first fader as well which was a little unreliable after all these years (the machine was build Jan. 12th, 1987). So i must say, if you got vintage gear that needs fixing and you are in Germany, talk to this guy, he knows what he does! Cheers Niko! In the video above you´ll find a little beat i just started, sorry for the bad quality, but it was dark and taken with my mobile phone. I´ll upload a audio version while progressing with the track!

About two years ago i switched DJ tools from regular vinyl records to a DVS. After some research i went with Torq over Serato and Traktor. The Main reasons where the price tag ($ 299), the ability to use my RME RPM instead of the soundcard delivered with the Software, the features and the really easy midi implementation. So now i have several midi controllers which control functions in my software. I use a Korg nano key for Loops, Cuepoints and the instant double feature. for the internal effects i do use the nano control pictured above. When you get it from the factory all the channels look identical which, in a dim club setup, makes it quite difficult to use. So my idea was to paint it in bright colors. One color stands for an effect and since i use two turntables the colors double. The right side is for the right channel and the left for the corresponding deck. For painting it I dissembled the whole thing, taped the regions I don't want to paint and did the job with regular spraypaint. Afterwards I reassembled it and i must say, even though it could have been done more acurately i'm really satisfied with the result.

Here we go again. I'm still trying to repair my SP-12 i bought off ebay. The issue was the display suddenly not showing any characters anymore which i could locate to the connections of the flat ribbon cable between the mainboard and the display. After a closer check i could see that the cable broke right behind the soldering points. In the pictures you can see a little story on how we exchanged the cable and resoldered the display to the mainboard. This took us several hours but in the end we couldn't help anything with it. The Display still won't show any characters and we have another issue coming up: After powering up, the machine will boot and then after working for a second it will stall and not respond to anything. This could have something to do with the battery which powers the sample RAM, that might have lost it's power over the last 25 years, so I ordered a new one that will arrive this week. Wish me good luck. To be continued...

I´ve written it before and it arrived a week ago: My new SP-12! I used to own one before but had to sell it for a computer in 2001, stupid! So i had to post some pictures of it for you and to show off, of course. Unfortunately i can' t present you any soundfiles since the display broke after 3 days of use. This is not too unexpected since the machine now is nearly 25 years old. This is the primary reason it was a hassle to track down a new display. All the types i have checked on were either not produced anymore or didn't fit, let alone the finding the original optrex display. So first thing i checked on was the cable connections from the motherboard to the display but those weren't the issue, it is the contacts in the display itself. Anyone with a little more inside view knows that this is annoying and sometimes impossible to repair. In the end i found someone in the us who has original "new" old stock optrex displays available. But after laughter comes the tears, this time price wise. The thing cost me 100 bucks. On the other hand i found someone who knows the problem and would repair it, but he was asking for for $ 80 per hour and said he would need one or two to do it. So i´d rather buy a new one and try to repair the old one myself. If anyone likes to see what can be done with this machine and how, you should check out this video on youtube. Alan Braxe explains the SP-1200 and how he programmed his hit Intro. Stay tuned!