Can you write a temporary eulogy for something you have to kill but may someday resurrect?

A little over 7 years ago, I made a Facebook post a reality. I posted, “God, I wish I could just get a job soldering all day.”. I’d just brought a synth I bought from a friend for $100 back to life with the minimal skills I had at the time, and I was jazzed. I had no idea a year later, I would embark on the opportunity to murder my excitement with a jackhammer.

I couldn’t be more grateful to have been given that opportunity.

Opportunities never really come outta nowhere. Electronics repair kinda runs in my family, actually. My dad troubleshot computer circuits for a living, way back when a computer was a village of hulking, discreet confabulations that took up an entire room just to do basic math. In my teens, I got into electric music gear, but with only a teen’s income, all I could afford was the vintage budget stuff. Christmas 1999, as an A-ha & Depeche Mode-obsessed kid, I asked for a genuine analog Oberheim synth. This was back when they cost $135. They go for nearly 10 times that now! Christmas day, I ferociously tore through the wrapping to lay eyes on my destiny. It was glorious. It would not turn on all the way. My dad, heartbroken at my despondence, sprung into action. We rushed the Oberheim to his workbench to perform emergency neurosurgery. An hour later, I was banging out the lead melody of “Take On Me”. Being an aspiring punk rocker, I was pretty rough & tumble with my equipment. My dad assumed the role of my touring tech. He could have just performed the role silently, but he always asked me to come watch & listen. Gradually, he had passed on enough of his expertise that I could be my own tech. Fixing guitar cables, resoldering the joints of abused input jacks, replacing blown resistors & leaky electrolytic caps… Under his tutelage, I grew in competence until I was also helping maintain friends’ equipment. I’d always been intrigued by electronics; I actually tried to construct a robot with leftover parts he had from keeping my mom’s work computer cutting edge throughout the 90’s. I got further than somebody who had no idea what they were doing should’ve. By the time I graduated highschool, I was keeping that Oberheim I got for Christmas in ‘99 alive.

When I moved to Pittsburgh, I wasn’t very good at interviews. I had trouble finding work. A friend saw my knack for keeping my gear out of a landfill and asked if I’d be his tech. I didn’t do a very good job, but the job did get done. I realized I’d need some kinda education if I wanted to improve. I put that possibility on a backburner to simmer quietly in the background. It didn’t wind up being fate that finally presented me with the opportunity, but frustration and a fat tax return. In 2015, the screamo band that was my impetus in life broke up and I was out of an artistic outlet. Maybe it was just the free time to let my imagination meander, but fragments of songs that’d been floating around in my mind for ages suddenly congealed into an album. Grungy synthy indie rock, painstakingly crafted songs recklessly rammed through outdated FX racks & tape decks in dire need of refurbishing. I needed some of that vintage gear again; I’d sold my childhood Oberheim one desperate month to avoid homelessness. The internet had since found out about the magic of old gear, so bargains were hard to come by. I jumped on the first couple I found: a Radioshack Moog and the worst Korg that was still all analog & polyphonic. The Realistic MG-1 was suffering from the dreaded crumbling dust-trap foam under the front panel, I thought I could just buy some rubbing alcohol and solve the issue with my knife & a washcloth. The Korg Poly61 was advertised as working fine, but arrived in a sad, crumpled heap on my doorstep. I quickly realized both were way beyond my paygrade. Instead of just admitting I’d sunk the only spare change I had into total lemons, I turned up the heat on the backburner dream. I scoured the world over for some kinda music gear technician program, found only one: the Analog Lab tech mentorship course. $2k, and you get online sessions with a genuine mad genius: one of Pink Floyd’s head gear techs from their heyday in the 70’s. I’d had a busy year working as a shift supervisor at a bagel shop, so I was owed a hefty return that April. I could’ve put that $2k toward a lotta things, but everyone around me implored me: maybe there’s no such thing as fate, but it was just too uncanny that my tax refund & the tuition fees for that gear tech program were the same exact amount. I sent my money to Jeff of The Analog Lab and the rest is history. 18 months later, I graduated the tech mentorship course. A couple months after that, I quit my miserable bagel boy day job and launched The Music Mechanic.

I know I was still not very good for the first few years. I made a lot of rookie mistakes, but no matter what it cost me, I made up for every one of them. I got a reputation not as a precise master, but as someone who will just keep plugging away til it gets done. As such, my success rate was 99%, but my turnaround time was spotty as hell. If not for friends who believed in me, I might’ve had to come crawling back to that bagel shop. It was a pretty hairy couple years, but I never had to turn back. That is, until the world was dumped unceremoniously into a pandemic…

So much of my work depends on Mouser’s cheap prices & 2 day shipping. When quarantine was starting to grip every aspect of the global economy, I saw the writing on the wall for The Music Mechanic and placed a desperate bid: I applied at the cute French bakery up the street. To my utter surprise, they hired me to begin immediately. Thank god, because I was spot-on about the parts market supply chain crash, but there was an upside to the pandemic I didn’t anticipate: the effect stimulus checks would have on musicians who found themselves with a whole lot more free time on their hands. Soon as I started my first week at Madeleine Bakery, friends of friends of guys who saw my ads on Craigslist started hitting me up to bring the beloved old kit that’d been rotting in the back of their closet back to working order. The avalanche of work I had pouring in throughout the 1st couple years of the pandemic was an economic accelerant, and soon, it looked like I might beat the economics adage that it takes every startup 5 years to become profitable. If I could just hang 10 on the tidal wave, I might ride to shore in style. I did my absolute best, but it became clear pretty quickly that I was in over my head. I worked 3 short 5-hour days at the bakery and put in around 60hrs at The Music Mechanic. Guess which one was paying my bills? In life, money is time, and time is money. You can make big money, but if you don’t make big money quick, it’s the same as small money. It would take me months to get through a pile someone would hand me, and at the end of it all, I would only break even. The stress was too much to even process. If I would ever even start to think about it, it would upset the whole delicate balance and hamper my ability to even attempt the work at all. That did happen a couple times and it set me back a whole season. I have to admit, I think it affected my relationship too…

Throughout the years of just putting in the time as The Music Mechanic, I’ve had a secret goal for the job: to accumulate my own studio of gear. When I started The Music Mechanic, the attic of the house I shared with my honey was my music room. It’s a huge room and it was full of gear. I was working on finally creating all the music that’s piled up in my head since I was a kid. It was my main reason for being! I was so miserable at my shift supe gig, though, that I sold it all to fund the startup costs of The Music Mechanic. All I had left was the gear I couldn’t ever fix up enough to sell. It was painful losing all those tools, friends, I had acquired through the agony of food service purgatory, but the hope of financial freedom was worth the gamble. It was a bigger sacrifice than I may have realized at the time, so thank god it paid off, but it was pretty depressing trying to replace a room full of glorious old equipment that simply sounded like I’d always dreamed any time I played it with all software. I know folks say it’s not the gear, it’s the musician, but there’s a reason everyone still shells out several grand for Roland Junos when virtual versions exist for chump change. I tried to hold out as long as I could, but there was just nothing for it: I needed to rebuild my studio again. Over the course of the next 5 years, I became a gear broker. Having the skills to salvage almost anything from the brink of oblivion meant I could pick up decent kit for peanuts. Time is money, but money is time, and maybe what I saved in upfront costs I lost in the days & days it takes to get abused equipment back to the pink of health, but I was so successful at this game that I could play it on a whim and come out ahead every time. I never lost a dime on it. I guess it helps that, in step with the ethos of how broken & decayed I want my music to sound, I only keep gear that I can never fix up enough to sell for top dollar. I’ve had to let things go that were an ache of a goodbye to say, and the utter insanity of the vintage gear market means there’s gear I miss dearly that I may just never be able to justify owning again, but by the time my I broke up with my partner and was ready to move out, I had to rent a huge truck to haul my Laboratory of Misfit Kit. A strange thing happened, though; I found I didn’t even turn a lot of it on for a long time. It wasn’t that I’d given up on the dream, the ideas never stopped flooding in, it’s just that I was always so tired by the time I hung up my soldering iron to cool off for the day. Why then did I keep stockpiling all these treasures I can’t take to heaven? It wasn’t what forum dorks call GAS (or, Gear Acquisition Syndrome); nobody lusts after a Yamaha SY77 or Roland D10, both cornerstones of my recordings. I was gearing up in a couple different senses for a season of my life to come, I just didn’t know it in the front of my mind yet. Of all the backburner dreams, one has been simmering since I was a child. Lately, that pan has been boiling over.

I try not to believe in fate, but I’m susceptible to magical thinking. I try not to see signs everywhere, but sometimes the coincidences in life are just too dang apparent. I try not to believe metaphorical doors just mystically close & open to usher you through life’s labyrinth when you get discombobulated, but that’s simply always been my experience. Whenever I feel stuck or lost, I knock on a door to see if it beckons me in or slams in my face. I’ve felt both stuck & lost as The Music Mechanic for a long time. The pandemic was honestly a rejuvenating period of reflection for me. It granted me the time & space to try some things I’d always wanted to try, like building my own guitar pedals from scratch or developing synth hacks I could sell as a side hustle or making jewelry from parts left over after a repair job, but the stimulus checks also gave me the chance to try something I’d always been almost too curious about to want to actually attempt: going back to school. School & have always been arch enemies. By the time I graduated high school, I was pulling decent enough grades, but I was never a great student all around. In particular, I always had a hell of a time with math. In my inaugural year of high school, my turmoil with arithmetic was so great that I finally undertook an intensive evaluation to see if I had any learning disabilities. I turned out to have most of the major ones, but also number dyslexia: dyscalculia. There it was, in a doctor’s report, my trouble with numbers. Unlike words, which I always scored in the top percentile of the world for on achievement tests, numbers are slippery devils. They change shape as I work with them. I’ll put two of them together in simple addition and it won’t add up. I graduated with an A in Algebra 2, but that was my second attempt at it. I took a week of Geometry and washed out. I’ve always approached my repair work as an enlightened guesser. My window into understanding reverse-engineering was my comprehension of the moving parts of music itself. I grasp the operational flow of a synthesizer, so I can visualize what must be wrong with it if it fails. If there’s digital shriek in the analog output of a reverb rack, I know instinctually it must be a decoupling cap that wandered out of spec, even though I couldn’t tell you the formula for why exactly the unwelcome frequency curve suddenly audible betrayed that it was a decoupling cap and not a coupling cap. Almost always, my instincts are right, but often not in the way I initially think. Troubleshooting would be a crapshoot even with an MIT degree, but without one it can be a shot in the dark. I’ve rarely been so wrong that I’ve exacerbated the problem I was trying to solve, but it has happened, and I think that’s just not acceptable for a professional. Plus, my turnaround times were only marginally better after years of honing my skills. Two years after lockdown hit, I found myself with a lull in repair work, stability at the bakery, stimulus checks in hand, and several grand in Pell Grants, so I went back to school. Anticipating an uphill battle from the logical side of the subject, I opted for a community college certificate in a part time curriculum. Any other program, I would have to work full time at the bakery to make ends meet, but the Electrical Engineering cert at CCAC was so cheap, I’d get to keep a lot of the Pell money to put towards my bills so I could just focus on learning as much as possible. I thought it would be the perfect scenario. It ended up being the first major stroke of bad luck that forced my hand.

After lockdown, college enrollment was down across the board. It affected even Ivy League institutions, but hit community colleges the hardest. The CCAC campus I attended was a ghost town. I was in the EE program with 10 other people. It was pretty spooky. The first semester played out auspiciously enough. With the resources to accommodate my dyscalculia, I unveiled myself as a straight-A student who was only buried under an archaic education model that didn’t suit me. I made the Dean’s List for the first time in my life. I was stimulated, engaged, hopeful. It wasn’t meant to be. Midway through the 2nd semester, the CCAC board announced they were shutting down almost every program at that campus except for nursing. They’d still honor everyone who’d already enrolled, but they wouldn’t be taking any new admissions. I completely commiserate with my EE teacher, who was also the head of the department, but she flew into a panic. The carefully crafted curriculum fell apart, and I could feel my education flying off the rails. The semester ended without much incident, and I still made the Dean’s List again, but I was worried and wondering if I should jump ship before I went down with it. I didn’t have a choice. I could not afford to jump ship now. I’ve always done my best learning as basically an autodidact who needs an occasional course-correction from a patient mentor, so I resolved to just be the teacher I needed for myself, use the college’s resources to give myself an education then collect the piece of paper I paid for at the end. I didn’t know it would all devolve into a class full of people expecting to learn about microcontrollers getting conscripted to construct an automated farmbot for some bizarre scheme to sell produce at a farmer’s market to save a teacher’s job. Obviously, her ploy didn’t work out and we did not receive even a day of learning on the subject we signed up for. 3 weeks into the 3rd (and final) semester, she was placed on administrative leave. The classes were the hardest for me yet: digital logic & the math behind the black magic of transistors. I genuinely wracked my brain just trying to keep up, but felt myself falling behind. The employee tasked with picking up the disgraced department head’s slack was the lab moderator, who was given a week to make sense of her scribbled notes for the courses. He did his best, and I commend him endlessly, but it was just not enough. I was relegated to turning to Google to answer my muddled questions about this subject I was having a hard time with. Somehow, I managed to pull through with a perfect GPA. I graduated on the Dean’s List. I wish I could go back in time to when I was struggling with my multiplication tables while the rest of the class was given ice cream money for breezing through theirs, show myself that it was always the setting and not my worth as a human… Worthy as I definitively proved myself to be, education had failed me again. I got my certificate, but it felt like a waste. The improvements to my practical skills were only subtle. It saved me minutes, not months. It was not enough. With only enough left of my lifetime Pell eligibility to take the last couple EE courses CCAC was offering before the program shut down for good, but without the certainty that I had even gleaned enough knowledge to not just find myself needing to start over from the beginning, I conceded that I had reached a stalemate with higher learning. I needed a 4 year degree that I needed to already have the benefits of to embark on attaining. I had sought a ladder upwards and bumped my head on a low ceiling.

There was only one hope for me now if I ever wanted upward mobility: the gear game. With school over, and my social life empty after the breakup, I threw myself into the used gear market. I’d accidentally bought a stack of dead rack FX processors while checking the tax on an eBay listing as the bus I was on tackled one of those famous Pittsburgh potholes, and it ended up being such a stroke of fortune, I thought I had finally found my way forward. With relative efficiency, I turned $350 worth of burnt-smelling metal into $1.5k of sales. Time is money and money is time and big money is small money if it isn’t fast money, and this was the fastest money I had ever made. I’ve made more refurbishing synthesizers, and my record at the time was a pure grand of profit from resurrecting then upgrading the hell out of a Roland JX-10, but rack units were the perfect gambit: typically straightforward to solve, easy to acquire parts for, and cheap to ship. More than any other type of gear, they seem to not only get listed for peanuts, but to sell in only a couple weeks. Some of the synths I’ve sold have taken seasons to finally get the hell out of my hair. Racks were always out of my sight in a month tops. The Lexicon PCM91 I got for $200 and sold for $900 may not have topped that JX-10 I sold for $1.6k, but it took an afternoon of work to get in selling shape vs. half a year of toil to finish. In a line of work where nothing ever seems to just go smoothly, reselling racks was such a cakewalk it felt like fate. I scored a Yamaha SPX2000 that I was sure was fried for good, only to solve it with $20 of parts for $300 of profit. In just two months of buying, fixing, and selling rack FX, I had covered the costs of moving AND going from paying $500 a month in bills to $1k. I had finally managed to buy myself time for the first time since I founded The Music Mechanic.

Over time, a backlog of gear I couldn’t fix yet for one reason or another had piled up so much that it filled my workshop. With my financial lead, I resolved to get through the backlog once & for all, take a short break, then start over with a clean slate. First, though, one of earliest & staunchest supporters had a job for me: a massive overhaul on a 60’s combo organ salvaged from rotting in a barn since at least the 80’s. It didn’t sound like it would be the hugest deal, it was advertised as only suffering from one bum note card, but I geared up for potentially my largest endeavor yet. I had no fucking idea what I was in for. I bought my new spool of solder for the season and got to work. Within a week, I had the whole job looking like it was finished. There was a lot more wrong than just that one bum note card, but the problem was only film capacitors so old they had started to mold over. I evicted all of ‘em for nice new substitutes and the organ seemed to work better than projected new. I replaced tons of the deranged old germanium transistors with functional modern silicon equivalents and it was such a success, there was no warmup time for the tuning anymore. Still, I’d learned a couple cautions over the years, and I opted to let the organ sit with the lid open for a couple days, just to make sure nothing unexpected would rear its head in a stress test. I saved a lot of face with my friend that way. I turned the organ back on a couple days later to find all my work had been undone by some unseen force. Now all the notes were scrambled, some weren’t even producing notes but netherworldly howls. I tried not to panic because sometimes with these old dogs, things get worse before they can be made better. I plunged into that freejazz dissociative state all athletes & performing artists slip into to make the magic happen, and I came to half a day later with the organ working like a charm again. I went to bed hopeful that I’d hit my stride at long last and not even a minor college scandal that robbed me of an education could dull my shine now. So when I woke up the next day to test the organ, I was treated to a full-on emotional breakdown. I thought the howling notes were jarring yesterday, but this was like an aural portal to hell. The tormented wailing of the damned… I just had to shut the lid and go to bed.

A week later, my emotional fortitude had replenished enough that I opened up the organ again. Each note of a transistor organ is handled by one of a handful of cards, with pairs of transistors screaming at each other filtered by capacitors to produce 5 octaves of every note. It’s a wonder it even works at all, especially considering Germanium’s ungermain disposition and the way old components go senile, so maybe I just needed to replace everything in the entire organ? It wouldn’t have even cost that much… I asked my friend if she wanted to just go this route and be done with it and she said hell yeah. She sent me the $50 or so I needed for the parts, and I felt hopeful again. The note cards of my own mind stopped their agonized caterwauling. Couple days later, I set to work. Somehow, I knocked out the entire endeavor in a day. It was my greatest feat of freejazz athleticism yet. I felt like fate wanted to see a display of determination from me that it would respond to in good faith. I felt the light of Christ illuminating me the next morning when I finally got to test it. So obviously, it was among the worst feelings I’ve ever felt in my life when the screams of the damned greeted me with extra bile at having been silenced for a moment. I felt like I was losing my mind. I fell to the floor and cried. It did not make one lick of logical sense. I did not know what the fuck to do. I broke the bad news to my friend and tried to work on something else.

I tried to focus on other things, only to be met with a baffling resistance. I began to believe I had been cursed, a hex I earned by not having any idea yet what I had done to earn it. A month later, I was so numb from nothing going right in any aspect of my life that I turned on the organ for another session of self-flagellation. The screams of the damned greeted me sardonically, asking how I’d been. It pissed me the fuck off. Something in my mind turned from despair to steely hate. I would solve this problem out of sheer malice. I would send the devil out on his fucking ass! I put on my magnifying glasses and inspected the worst offender of the note cards: the F key, funnily enough. It was eaten alive by strange, aquamarine mold. In a jolt of panic, I tossed it across the room. I ran to the grocery store, bought bleach and gloves and masks. I set up a quarantine room to rid this poor instrument of the scourge. I disassembled it completely and sprayed every millimeter of it with bleach. I let it dry in a wind tunnel of fans. I checked on it later, the mold had multiplied, eaten the bleach & flourished. I did not despair, the flames of my loathing roared. I borrowed some industrial grade mold killer from a friend. In a day, I had won the war that had plagued my life. A week later, I handed the organ back to its owner for the most vehemently needed chunk of change in my life.

I felt empowered. I had come up against the most manxome foe of my career and come out… well, not ahead, and definitely not unscathed, but intact. I almost quit this work entirely. I thought I had degraded mentally somehow to where I could no longer perform my profession reliably. It was all a lark! It was just a problem I did not understand. It broadened my perspective. I may have had my feet held to the fire, but I walked away with wisdom. I determined myself to launch into a new chapter of The Music Mechanic, sure that I would make my way up the ladder and maybe even be able to buy a car soon.

It’s often the positive takeaways that set you up for despondence most masterfully, huh.

The friend who commissioned me to fix the organ dropped off a drum machine for me to refurbish. It was mostly fine, the master tempo clock just seemed to get confused. She actually wanted me to see if I could put it on a switch as a fun feature for experimental performances. It sounded like a cinch. After the fiascos I’d just endured, I was confident. I found the issue right away: more moldy film caps & dementia-addled germanium transistors. I replaced them and it looked like I had finished the job in an afternoon. I let it sit overnight just to make sure. I fired it on the next day and was shoveled right back into hell again. It was not working at all. Not even a little bit. I’ll spare you the month long quest I tumbled into, but nothing I did made a lick of difference. It was even more baffling than the organ, because this time, there was no visible mold. It made even less sense than no sense, it was so nonsensical it dragged all of reality into a realm of higgledy-piggledy. I put the poor dear on a shelf and tried to lose myself in other work. Another friend dropped off a beautiful vintage receiver that just wasn’t passing audio. After testing, I concluded definitively that the whole problem was just gunk inside an input selector switch. I cleaned it out and fixed a bunch of iffy solder joints for good measure. It sounded fantastic upon testing and I gave it a clean bill of health. She was set to pick it up a few days later. I happened to just want to hear one of my favorite records through it, so I turned it on again. I was greeted not with the melodious strains of Elysian Fields through honeyed 70’s solid state, but a battlefield of crickets being roasted alive like popcorn. I popped the lid and watched tiny bolts of lightning flit inexplicably between a 35v power rail & a -15v volt line. The screams of the damned threw off their popcorn cricket disguises. Hell had claimed itself as my home now. I inspected the power supply board with my magnifying glasses in lieu of knowing what the hell else to do. I’ve long used AIM no-clean flux solder because I lose a lot of time scraping resin off PCB’s, so I don’t let my OCD get anal about it. This resin looked different, though. There was no mold in this receiver to skirmish with, so what I was seeing was something alien to me even after all the strangeness I’d witnessed lately. It looked like beeswax gone rancid. I touched it, and sure as the surprise on my face, I received a jolt of electricity. I measured just the clump of the rancid resin with my voltmeter, a straight 12v DC, just sitting there where no metal was. A couple of the traces on the PCB weren’t coated right from the factory, leaving random corners exposed. The resin had formed a short between several of them. I got to work scraping it all off, but found the filmy, gummy grease needed to be scrubbed out with rubbing alcohol too. I cleaned all the gunk off all the boards almost automatically; I don’t even remember doing it, really. I turned the receiver on to test… and it just very simply worked fine, as if nothing ever happened.

That spool of solder I bought for the big organ job? I got sent the wrong kind by Mouser. I like to work with thin gage solder wire, usually .32, but this was .62. I figured I’d just use it for the wider joints and save the rest of the thin wire spoil for tighter spacings then buy another spool of .32 after this crop of jobs was done. What I didn’t notice was that this wasn’t merely thicker gage solder wire, it was water-soluble rosin-core wire. A new product, with some jargon gimmick name… The datasheet was a little cagey, it referred to the newly developed flux by an acronym but never told us what the acronym stood for. It said the residue must be cleaned up after a job immediately with scalding hot water from a high pressure hose. I looked up the jargon, something about “Halides”, and found in an electrical engineering forum a circle of techs trashtalking water soluble flux as a perilously destructive chemical compound. Everything they were saying matched the trouble I was having! It looks like water-soluble flux was a failure back in the day, but is getting a rebrand now. I fell unwitting victim to it. It was only after doing due diligence on a frenzied hunch that I connected the dots. This solder I was given by mistake, it was rife with gremlins. I could not have known going into it, there was nothing to indicate it on the spool of solder itself, but I still felt like I should have caught it earlier, at least. I didn’t use it on everything I worked on through that period. Coupled with the fact that two of the things I worked on were suffering from mold infestations, my deductive prowess was muddied. I didn’t feel any better realizing that, though. I felt punished. I actually started to look for new jobs. I had a certificate in Electrical Engineering, after all! It didn’t do me any favors. I knocked on around 50 doors, only one opened to me: a job at a Mitsubishi plant. 50hrs a week, mandatory overtime on weekends & holidays, swing shifts, and a 2 & 1/2 hr commute. I would’ve had to buy a car just to start working there. It wasn’t even that much better than the $20 an hour I was making at the bakery. Seeing the bleakness of my alternatives, I decided to give Mu-Mek another go. This time, I sold something I didn’t need, but hurt to part with: that Lexicon PCM91 I made around $700 of profit on. I put some of the money towards debts, some towards savings (the first time I’d been able to save money in too long a time), and around $100 into another reverb that would help me not miss the PCM91 so much. I had broken even and could invest back into the biz!
Then a Korg DSS-1 I sold got damaged in shipping. Then a Yamaha SPX2000 I sold got damaged in shipping. The DSS-1 was infected with the demon solder anyway. Took a month til I had it working again. Things got so tight, I sold a phaser pedal I bought for myself and was thrilled to break even. All told, the demon solder nearly bankrupted me, and UPS’s handling didn’t help either. It was a foetid stretch of time that I barely survived, but I did survive and in spite of everything, I was raring to try again. I decided to put half my tax return toward a nice Hakko desoldering gun, and the other half toward a project to fix up to put me in the big leagues. I scanned the web for a week then found the perfect candidate: a Lexicon PCM70 for $350 that wasn’t passing wet audio. I’d fixed all the budget Lexicons from the same era as the PCM70, and reading the listing, I figured it must just be a shorted -15v analog rail. I was right, but I should’ve done my due diligence. I broke one of my cardinal rules of buying iffy stuff to fix: always ask the seller about the history of the unit first, then look up the issue to make sure it isn’t a death knell. I didn’t do either of those things. I’ve watched gear sell while I was waiting for a response from the seller, and I didn’t wanna miss this opportunity. I pounced on it what I thought was my destiny. I really should’ve known by now that destiny is just the bait for a trap. Lexicon PCM70’s are infamous for a total roll of the dice. The way they were designed, Lexicon cut a couple key corners in interfacing the digital circuits with the analog ones, and basically left the custom FX processor chips potentially vulnerable to a -15v shotgun blast. I would’ve known this if I’d done my due diligence. If I’d looked it up, I’d have seen that what the seller was describing were the symptoms of the FX processor chips potentially dying. Instead, I learned this truth slowly, through about a month of tinkering. I figured this would be fast cash, Lexicon PCM70’s in great condition with the newest firmware yet older presets go for $1.5k. I figured I would just have to replace a couple op-amps. I did have to replace them, but I wound up having to replace just about everything else too. In trying to deny the ticket I just bought to bust, I replaced everything inside the PCM70 I could get my hands on. Most of it is still manufactured, but there’s two last things that could be causing the trouble. One is these chips that are common, but hard to find someone who can burn the firmware onto. The other is simply not available for sale as a spare anywhere in the world. There’s a guy on a forum who says he’s working on a replacement for the unobtainium, but the going is slow and he won’t divulge any details. Probably because he thinks if he can solve this issue, this will be his big ticket. I despise him for it, but I know the feeling. I’ve had a very distant backburner idea I’ve thought might be my own big ticket. See, there’s this drum machine that everybody used in the 90’s. Autechre, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, every Chicago house legend… Roland’s R8. The original is beloved and goes for around $3-500, which is really good for a digital drum machine. There’s an upgraded version that contains all the card expansions with extra drum samples onboard. That one started selling for a grand. I’ve seen the schematics for both, the difference is pretty negligible. The firmware for the MKII is online, so I tried it in my MKI R8, and it boots up fine, it’s just missing the extra waveforms of the MKII’s ROM. The sample ROMs aren’t anywhere online, so I’ve always meant to buy an MKII, rip the ROMs, and see about designing a kit to upgrade an MKI into an MKII. If I could pull it off, I could sell them as an expansion. It’s not BIG money, but it might be car money! R8 MKII’s are expensive now, so I’ve kept my eyes peeled for one in need of some love. I sold a few things I fixed and wondered what to do with the extra $$, when lo & behold a $300 R8 MKII shows up on Reverb.com. I pounced. I knew this time, even if the kit idea doesn’t work out, I can definitely sell the MKII for at least double what I put in. It was a safe bet either way, but I could strike it… well, richer than I am. I was ignoring the fact that we’re in a recession and the vintage gear market is in the coalmine canary index.

I receive the drum machine and rip the ROMs and burn copies to test, and yes, it looks like an MKI can indeed be turned into an MKII. It just is not as straightforward a process as it looked in the schematics. Not only are the wave ROMs different, but the mapping is different. There’s also an extra RAM chip in the MKII and a couple extra logic chips to handle the expanded memory. To turn an MKI into an MKII, I need to design adapter boards for the ROMs, but I also need to cut the traces of a logic chip, rewire it with the new chip, solder in the new SRAM chip, and rewire a couple other traces. Even when I have the adapter board done, it’s not a simple upgrade at all. Anyone who wants it done would have to send their R8 to me and I would have to do the installation by hand. It’s not terribly extensive, and it would get easier with the practice, but it’s not a kit I can just sell. I would have to charge extra for the labor for it to be worth my time. I haven’t mocked up a cost yet because I don’t know what the custom PCB’s will cost, but it’s looking like at the end of the day, for all I have to charge for the upgrade, you kinda might as well just wait for a kinda scuffed up R8 MKII to show up for sale. This isn’t a huge blow by any means, and I was prepared for this eventuality, but… it just isn’t the leg up I really need. It’s kinda disappointing, and I could handle that, if it weren’t for it falling in the most cursed year of my career. I can’t help but feel like it’s a sign. I am the coyote chasing the roadrunner here. I am only going to keep smacking into a wall if I keep trying.

The truth is, we’re headed for certain economic collapse. I think it may be part of the Trump team’s plan, or something. I don’t know. I really don’t care. I finally sat down to do a cost analysis and doodle up a working budget and update my pricing, and it just hurts my soul. I’ve always undersold my services for commissioned repairs, probably out of a sense of imposter syndrome, yeah, but also because I really want everyone to be able to afford me. I know the excitement of scoring a tape deck from Goodwill for $20 just to get it home and realize it wasn’t even worth the $20. I don’t want someone to have to shell out $100 to me just to feel good about that $20 tape deck. It hurts my heart. I don’t do this job for the love of money, I do it for the love of gear, but really, the love of people. I want to help people! I want to be a boon to my community. It feels great to say I’m The Music Mechanic. Not because it’s cred or some bullshit, but because musicians always light up: “Oh! I should get your number! I’ve got this Tascam…”. I want to be radical in whatever way I can afford to be, and fighting planned obsolescence is punk as fuck. I know the joy I feel in watching my efforts bring a beloved instrument back from the dead. I want to give that to as many people as possible. I just… I can’t. It takes so much time for me to do this work. I’m always drastically underestimating how long jobs will take. Musicians who aren’t versed in electronics can only describe the problem the gear exhibits to a degree, so often my initial prognosis is that this should be a cinch. It almost never is. There’s always comorbidities or snags that only arise somewhere deep down the line. I’ll take on a project that someone who doesn’t really know this stuff looked up and saw hopeful analyses for only to find that they should’ve read the warnings before sending it to me. A lot of the time, I’m fixing what was a simple problem, but musicians poking around turned it into a near-impossibility. Sometimes, I just need some technical info from the manufacturers they refuse to give me because I’m not in their authorized network. I can’t get in their authorized network because they only let you apply if you’re a brick & mortar retailer. That’s why Syntaur sells new synths while their parts warehouse is almost completely out of stock. When I got into this game, I thought I could grant music gear the immortality humans will never attain. It’s just not true. Everything will die someday. We will all flame out into the sun. When I think about that, it makes me ponder what I really want to do with my time. The answer, frankly, is just not this work anymore. Yes, I am driven by passion. Yes, I do love this job when my eyes cloud over and I’m operating at lightspeed from my second sight. Most of the time, I’m stuck grinding down my tire tread in 1st gear, though. If I’m honest with myself, I do not have the resources I need to be The Music Mechanic my city deserves. I need to go back to school, get a 4 year degree. There’s just nothing else for it, I need more education. There’s no way I can make that happen at this juncture. Not financially, not intellectually, not even emotionally. I do not have the money, I do not have the time, and I do not have the gumption to start over from the bottom again. I am exhausted. I need to not worry if I’ll be able to pull all these threads together again this time. I am not a businessman, I’m an anticapitalist. Why am I trying to be a petit bourgeois?

I’m not giving up on it entirely. Not forever, just indefinitely. I’ll probably always buy & resell gear I fix up, I just don’t want to rely on it for my livelihood. I don’t want to have to raise my prices. I don’t want to have to move to LA to make it work. What I want is the thing the Music Mechanic was supposed to give me all those years ago when my fast food job was sabotaging all my efforts to never work in fast food again: time to make my own music a reality. It’s been 10 years since I recorded the demo of my first album. The songs never stopped piling up. I have 18 albums of material all ready to be realized. I have to embark on that while my body is still willing. Another thing is, my favorite aspect of the Music Mechanic, by far, is interfacing with fellow musicians. It has opened so many doors for me, introduced me to so many cool new people. I was afraid that if I took a break, I would lose that. I’m not so afraid anymore. I’ve been meeting people now not under the auspices of fixing their stuff, but creating art together. Booking shows, dancing, recording songs, jamming… That is what fills my soul with joy and all I want is the freedom to explore that to whatever level I can take it to. I need to get it out of my system at the very least, but I suspect I might see some kinda success if I keep at it. I believe in it. It is my reason for living now. I want to devote everything to it, but like the repair work, it just takes so much time. It also eats up the same energy I spend doing repair work, so if I deplete the one reserve, I have none left in the tank for the other. Plus, I kinda suspect solder fumes & the dust of ages fucks with my allergies. Maybe there is no such thing as fate, but all I see are signs that I need to put the brakes on and try something new, even if only for a few years. I doubt I will fully close the chapter on this book, there will always be burning questions in my mind that I need to answer, like what the hell should I do with this colossal arsenal of vintage 4558 op-amps I’ve accumulated over the years… I just need to put a pin in it for now.

Going forward, I’m obviously gonna wrap up everything currently on my bench. If I’ve talked to you about fixing your kit and we just haven’t gotten the chance to make it happen yet, I’ll hold a place in line for you. It also never hurts to ask, the worst I can say is no and you’re only in the same position you were in before you asked.

My plan is, I’m gonna just work at Madeleine 4-5 days a week. I’m hoping to have an income from music I make ASAP, whether that’s from scoring whatever I can score or playing gigs. I’m gonna finally have a chance to turn all these discarded transistors into jewelry. I’m gonna try to write for some local mags. I’m gonna help my friend make a record. Gonna try to find a way to go viral in a way I don’t bristle at the thought of. The Music Mechanic is honestly very lonely, I’m excited to try to work with people again. I’m still apprehensive that in this world, this economy, I’ll ever own a house or anything, but if I ever have a shot at it, I think my only hope is in music. I guess we’ll see if the demon solder changes forms and follows me everywhere I try to go. I just know that if I’m really doing what I love, if I’m truly content & surrounded by people, I can defeat any demon solder formed against me. Who knows, maybe someday when I’ve made my records and said my peace, I’ll have the money & time & wherewithal to go to a tech school and get that EE degree. Then I’ll return, The Music Mechanic my city deserves.