.png)
Roland R-8
Repairing and Restoring the Roland R-8
The Roland R-8 was acquired as a job lot with another instrument. I am a sucker for a drum machine, so the acquisition of this Roland R-8 was a bonus. The second bonus was that when I opened the box containing the Roland R-8 I also found a Roland R-5. But the R-5 will be the subject of another video series.
On acquisition I noticed that the screen on the R-8 was not displaying the characters correctly. After a bit of Googling and reviewing a number of the forums it appeared that R-8's having defective screens was a known issue and would require the screen to be replaced to fix the problem.
This created a problem in itself. Most instruments of this era were supplied with an LCD screen and back light combination. And there are after market screens based on OLED technology that, with a few changes, can be fitted to the instrument. This is not the case for the Roland R-8. This LCD screen made by Samsung has a custom display and is no longer manufactured. There is no OLED equivalent that replicates this custom display.
Once I started to strip the drum machine down I found that there was additional work required to bring this instrument back into use within my studio.
