Roland VT-4 Blue LED Mod
Sometimes I wonder what the hell I'm thinking when I set out on these fucking mod projects. I've been without a vocoder for a while, so when I saw a Roland VT-4 on the auction here for a good price, I jumped on it. Green LEDs though, ugh. Too much of this green shit with the whole Aira range. I have a TB-3 on the way, actually. Another SAY WHAT?! price so I jumped on that one too. Anyway.
Love how that photo is a tad out of focus. Aaargh. Anyway you get the idea how it looks now. A huge improvement? I dunno. Personal preference, blue looks better than green did.
We need more robots. Uh, or more actual robots and less people who are like robots. Yeah, that.
Vocoders rule. BY YOUR COMMAND!!!
So obviously the LEDs were all surface mount, and by far the fucking SMALLEST I've ever dealt with. Nearly drove me crazy. My goddam hands shake like a tree in a hurricane anymore. I suppose there's a special soldering iron made that's just for desoldering SMD components, but I haven't looked, and if they exist they're probably fucking pricey, so I do what I can with the equipment I have on hand. I couldn't get the factory LEDs off the PCB using either desoldering braid or a sucker, so I was like "Well, shit." But then I had the brilliant idea to just carefully apply the tip of the soldering iron across the width of the entire LED (like 1 fucking millimeter, seriously) and then gently slide the whole thing off the solder pads. Of course, this destroyed most of the LEDs so there was no going back. I then cleaned the pads with braid, and put a wee dab of solder on each one, then set about carefully, slowly, nerve-rackingly soldering the blue LEDs. I stayed too long with the iron on one and accidentally melted the thing in half, so I had to take that one off and in the process lifted a fucking solder pad. AAAAARGH!!!! But, I am a crafty motherfucker, well-versed in ghetto-engineering and finding creative solutions, so I scraped the green screen off the trace leading to the pad, roughed it up a bit (carefully, mind you) with the tip of a scalpel, and then slathered solder onto it. A bit of careful LED placement and soldering iron witchcraft later, and the goddam LED was working. Yay me!
I gotta say that I really DON'T recommend trying this mod yourself. It was not as easy as I thought it would be, even though I got the results I wanted in the end. If you have steady hands, or an SMD component desoldering device, then go for it, but if you're like me and just have the every day synth repair and modding level stuff, you might wanna think twice before fucking with shit this small. Here, look at these photos to get an idea how small the LEDs are:
That's the underside.
That's the top. SMALL. AS. FUCK. Here's the bag of 20 each, five or six colors, SMD LEDs I got off Jamazon for like 5 bucks:
Those are 0805!!! (I think that means 0.8mm wide and 0.5mm tall) And those were a tad LARGER than the factory ones! I need a drink....