May the Pang be with you

A short track made using a Commodore 64 running Mssiah.
(Drums and vocals in Waveplayer so all samples in glorious 4 bit, 8 Khz! Synth lead in Monosynth. Recorded and mixed in Logic Pro)

Kawai Battery Replacement

Recently I was lucky enough to aquire a Kawai K4r. A 1989 digital classic!

Cosmetically it was in great condition but upon firing it up the machine gave me an Internal Battery Warning.

Contrary to what I'd expect, fixing this was very easy. There isn't much about it online however, hence me writing this post to help anyone else in a simliar situation.

First thing to do is to get a Cr2032 battery. You can get these EVERYWHERE! Mine cost me a quid.

Next open up the beast; as you can see from the photos the battery is easy to find AND in a clip holder, so no desoldering required.

Remove old battery and insert new one. Screw the beast back up.

You will have now lost all your preset sounds but do not fret,  KAWAI have them all available for download! How cool is that!

These can be transferred to your machine either with SysEx using something like SysEx Librarian or Elektron C6 SysEx Manager or with a MIDI file using any MIDI sequencer program that can play it.

I decided to go for the MIDI sequencer file option.

Import the downloaded .mid file to your favourite DAW. I used Logic.

Set the K4 to: INT PROTECT = OFF, RCV EXCL = ON and RCV CH = 1.

Then play the file on your DAW - make sure the track header is set to external MIDI.

And hey presto you're up and running!

I love this machine already so more Kawai K4r posts to follow...