Korg M1: Replaced The Battery - Now What?!
Thursday, September 23, 2004 at 8:27AM 1 Comment I hate - HATE - moving my Korg Triton Extreme around. In its 88-key version, it's enormous and simply not meant to be dragged around. So in an effort to have a more motile keyboard, I want to bring my 1990 Korg M1 back from the dead.
After the M1 gave me the dreaded "Internal Battery Low" message, I thought that it was pretty much done for. I'm still pissed that a freakin' battery can cause a synth to loose all internal sounds, but that's what happened. Even given that, why would Korg make it so hard to replace the battery, so that you have to remove the entire bottom of the keyboard and unscrew the motherboard?
After finding this handy M1 resource, I decided to follow the directions for replacing the battery. It actually went pretty well.
After replacing the battery, you get like a basic version of each patch, with no aftertouch or velocity-sensitivity or effects. The factory settings still have to be restored. The cheap way is to download them from Korg's UK site and then SysEx transfer the original sounds. The easy way is to order a $50 card. I haven't decided which route to take here, but if I can do it the cheap way, that's the way I would prefer to go. My computer doesn't have a MIDI interface, so I would at minimum have to have some sort of way to hook to the PC. And I need to determine which patch library would work. I don't know where all of this is going to end up, but it would be nice to have the workhorse back!
Reader Comments (1)
I'm having a problem loading the factory presets in sysex format onto my M1 from PC. I'm using Midiox and the midi transfer hardware is 'Midi mate'. EVerything seems to be working perfectly except when the download indicator bar gets 1/2 - 2/3 full, a message appears which says "!Sysex Output Devices: The port is transmitting data to the device. Wait till the data has been transmitted, and then try again". Then the download stops. The result is I get a range of sounds on the M1, but the names are still "Init Program" on all of them, and all are clean sounds - no effects (delays etc) on them. The pitch bender doesn't work, and the first sound is not the recognizable 'Univers' sound. Any ideas what's happening? Is my computer too slow to transmit? Should I be adjusting the Midiox software? Appreciate your help!