Korg Poly-61 MIDIbox Upgrade, Poly-61MB.

[Antichambre]

Hi all,

I place this project here baecause it's more than a simple midification of a vintage synth.

Here is the only existing post which talk about this subject here

It already exists a few retro kit for the Korg Poly-61, but i wanted to fully upgrade my old Poly-61.
It's a synth I owned for free, it was found at the back of a concert hall, in the trash. I fixed and renovate it.
Symptoms were the common ones, battery leakage on the porgrammer board, wood parts and some keys were destroyed.

Once it was fixed I got a lot of fun with it, it sounds typically 80s with a fat analog vibe and i love that.
but using MIDI for pretty everything I was very frustrated by the lack of midi control and it's limited control panel.

So I started to study something better.

I replaced all the digital part of the synth by a MIDIbox based one, I kept all the signal path like it is.
I also reuse the existing control panel
I recreate the exact behavior of the original one in MIOS32, named LEGACY mode, the original factory presets were implemented too.
The useless TAPE ENABLE switch at the back is now a switch between the LEGACY mode and the EXTENDED mode, it enhances the parameters ranges and adds some new parameters.

Finally I designed a dedicated Control surface which can be directly connected and powered to/by the Poly using USB.
The Poly has an USB device port to connect to a daw and an Host port to connect a MIDI controller.

Voilà!

Best Regards
Bruno

[cit]

wow ..what a great project. 

 

[njosnari]

Yo, this is absolutely amazing! 
How did you manage this??