Realistic Concertmate 690- owned from summer 2000? to present, bought for $10
This keyboard has a kind of interesting story behind it:
I'm lucky (?) enough to live by a Radio Shack warehouse outlet. There's a section in the back with lots of broken stuff, discontinued items, attempted repair items, etc. Most of it is junk but sometimes there's something nice. There are also "junk boxes" of miscellaneous items for $20. I bought several of them around 1998 but stopped bothering when I found out that they were mostly filled with cordless phones and remote controls. Anyway I went on a mission to find something to circuit bend (I had just recently heard about it) and this keyboard caught my eye (...plus there wasn't anything else decent there). It looked like it had been in a rather brutal accident. The front panel was ripped off, broken, and now completely detatched from the main unit. I observed that the internals seemed fine, and that it probably worked. $10 isn't much of a gamble, I thought, so I bought it.
The problem was that there was no speaker, no power switch, no volume control, and no rubber buttons- they had all come out when the panel came off. I replaced the power switch (4-mode slide switch) with a rotary switch, shorted the volume control to full blast (it was just another slide switch), installed a little speaker that was laying around, and an output (there wasn't one originally). The real trouble was the rubber buttons. I sacrificed a universal remote control (from a junk box) for the buttons and hot glued them in place. It sort of worked. The panel was really torn up, and a lot of it was uselessly hanging over the edge of the case into empty space (The SA-5 case is designed the same way, I really hate that) so I crudely sawed off the excess. Then I circuit bent it. Since it has a sound engine similar to the one in the SA-5 (through 4 voice instead of 2), the bends sound similar, though maybe not as good. The sound quality is questionable because I didn't do the best job of adding the output. I also painted/mutilated the case some more, which really just made it look horrible.
I don't want to post any photos because it looks ridiculous.
sounds:
concertmate690- if I remember correctly the noise is a result of the circuit bend, not because of a poor recording.
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