A couple of years ago I bought a Roland Juno 60 from eBay. It was in “fairly good” condition but was very dirty and the faders did not work properly. There also seemed to be a sticky (beer?) substance on all the keys that was less than attractive. Additionally the programs weren’t being saved correctly – probably the internal lithium battery was just about done.

So I thought it was about time I opened it up and cleaned out all the gunk, and fixed the battery at the same time.

The top section is hinged, and pretty easy to open.

7 screws hold down the keyboard. Once these were removed I could remove the whole unit. Each key is held in with a tension spring – carefully unhooking these allows each key to slide out.

A quick go in the dishwasher got rid of the gunk. When you put them back check the underside, they are labelled with the correct note position for each key.

Next up were the faders, I used some Deoxit “Fader Lube” on these and got them working smoothly again.

When I replaced the keyboard, I noticed that two keys were not triggering consistently – I used Isopropyl alcohol to clean the contacts and that seemed to fix it up.

Finally I de-soldered the old Lithium battery, and tacked in a regular 3.3V button cell. The negative terminal is on top (black wire), and the positive below (green wire)

The last step was to reload the programs back to the factory defaults. There are SAVE and LOAD audio jacks on the back of the JUNO-60. Originally you hooked up a tape recorder to save program data (yes, computers used to work like that). I found wave files of the original program data online, and transferred them out through the earphone jack of my laptop into the LOAD jack on the synth. You have to fiddle with the levels but it does work (eventually).

All done! Time to take it for test drive:

The delay effect in this video was provided by a Tascam 32 reel to reel tape recorder – looping the signal from the playback head back to the record head. – It doesn’t get more analog than this!