Synth Wizards Episode 9: Holy Grail: The Yamaha CS-80

at the centre shop in New Braunfels Texas even though we don't do any outside repairs we deal with a crazy number of broken synthesizers some of these keyboards go through the chop shop so that our customers have access to long obsolete parts other keyboards get repaired fairly quickly and then go into our showroom for sale and then there are the ones that sit for months or even years while we develop grand plans to somehow bring them back to life my wife the sensible one says we've had it all so long is it worth anything I the cyntha ball one counter with this is valuable stuff that will soon turn into treasures hi I'm Sam Mims and in this episode of synth wizards we're gonna take one of those big broken things and see if we can work some keyboard alchemy if we play our cards right maybe we can turn this into synthesizer gold here at centaur we live to bring old synthesizers back to life we find vintage keyboards wherever we can and our fruit restores them back to their original splendor we also supply parts to tens of thousands of customers all around the world so that they can restore and repair their own keyboards at our shop in Texas we have on hand parts for the cents used by pros from the 1960s all the way to today's brand new keyboards our inside and out knowledge has made us know Nazz the synth wizards back a few episodes ago I took the family on a vacation to Utah they weren't very surprised to learn that on the drive back home there just happened to be a keyboard in Arizona that I wanted to pick up I'd been fishing for that thing for about a year and finally worked a deal with the seller well folks we're here in an undisclosed location in Phoenix Arizona picking up some kind of special keyboard that's working at all it is a special keyboard it's the holy grail of polyphonic synthesizers it's a yamaha cs-80 and yeah we're spending thousands of dollars to buy a keyboard that doesn't work it's the biggest purchase we've ever made for a single keyboard but on the other hand if and when we get it refurbished and working it'll be the biggest sale we've ever made for a keyboard so it'll bring the highest dollar and these are very rare and very wonderful so I'm even more excited than Cody is that's right a short while later we were handing over the money and wheeling 220 pounds of analog goodness into the synth mobile but it was a big gamble the last time it had been turned on it started smoking from somewhere inside so it was quickly turned back off and then parked in a closet for years what worried me more than the smoke itself was the location of the smoke it was obviously not coming from the power supply which would likely have been an easy fix instead it was coming from deep in the heart of this beast where there are some integrated circuit chips which were made specifically for this one synthesizer those chips are so rare and sought-after that a single IC can sell for over $1000 if any of those chips were toasted I'd have to admit to Mary that this is one very expensive piece of junk and for anyone brave enough to operate on a cs-80 beware that it's integrated circuits are more vulnerable to damage than the components and most other synthesizers if a loose circuit board touches against the wrong thing it can easily short things out and fry those expensive chips or if you just touch some of the circuitry on a dry day and send a spark of static electricity into the C SAT you could render it deceased with those disconcerting thoughts it seemed like a good idea to simply Park this behemoth for a spell while we learned more about it and carefully figured out how we should proceed so let's get to the learning the C SAT and I started out about the same time in the music business in 1977 I was fresh out of high school and had started playing in bands I could barely afford a Univ acts compact piano which was about the cheapest thing you could get back then that had keys and made noise when Yamaha announced their new flagship cs-80 a polyphonic analog synthesizer let's just say that they were aiming for a different demographic it had a price tag of about seven thousand dollars that amount of money would have almost bought you a brand new Corvette or if you prefer Chevette s-- you could have bought two of those with hundreds of dollars left over for gas and leisure suits no see SATs were not showing up in bar bands less than 700 were made and they were being sent off to folks like Vangelis who featured it prominently in his soundtrack music for Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner or to performers like Stevie Wonder who toured with 4cs 80s and were they worth the money well Vangelis said that the cs-80 was the most important synthesizer in his career and was the best analog synthesizer design there has ever been those are some heavy words for this heavy keyboard so let's take a look at just what makes the C SAT so wonderful first of all if you touch the keys you immediately notice how nice the action feels each key is long like a piano key and pressing these down feels much more natural and responsive than a cheap plastic key bed with short keys the cs-80 keys respond to velocity and every key has its own after touch sensor even 40 years later very few keyboards offer polyphonic aftertouch and the ones that do don't feel as nice as the C SAT touching the panel controls gives you further tactile feedback that this was a quality instrument the sliders and switches feel smooth and over engineered like this thing was built to last two lifetimes the panel controls are there in duplicate that's because there is a synth one program and a synth to program that are always there for layering or cross-fading between them each is a two oscillator eight voice polyphonic synthesizer you can select sounds from the 28 program buttons one for synth one and one for synth 222 of these are presets that are hard-wired they can't be edited but there are also two that select the current panel settings plus four user memory presets now how are those user presets stored in an instrument that was built before ROM and RAM even existed well there's a secret compartment under this trapdoor and inside is basically a mini me no not a me mini me but four tiny versions of the C SAT front panel you can set all of these tiny sliders to be identical recreations of your favorite panel settings and if you look really closely with the magnifying glass in the corner of this compartment is an even tinier trapdoor with for many many Me's well not really but maybe we'll work on a mod for that once I had built up enough courage I went over to centaur North to poke around inside of our broken Z SAT this building is basically keyboard purgatory it houses all of the synthesizers and racks that are either going to get restored to their former glory or party down which direction what RCS ATV cars I light it on the floor to check the power supply fuses and to see if there might be any obvious visual clues as to why this thing had taken up the smoking habit the power supply is massive and it has three fuses right on top one of those fuses is missing the other two tested good I didn't see any obvious signs of damage so maybe this thing will be repairable the worst cosmetic flaw on this synthesizer is a broken key which has been glued back together we recently came across some cs-80 keys so while I have it open I'm going to get that key replaced okay to swap the key out in this you can see the plastic key is mounted on a very long bar and so we've got to remove this bar which keeps the keys in place and this one as well and so just do that with an electric and the way the key mechanism works is when you press a key the back of the key comes up and you can see it lifts up to leaf contacts there for each note by pressing down with my thumb on the top of those contacts and pushing the key forward at the same time I can get the back end of that around those contacts and then I can lift the key out and we'll get rid of this broken one and then the same thing in Reverse for the new key I'll take it slide the front of it in push it as far forward as we can go we can drop it in place there we are the last time this CS ad was used the previous owner turned it on saw a smoke from this area turned it off and that was kind of good to get stored away for a long time so when we were cleaning it up yesterday we found something that we hope might have been the source of the short that caused the smoke we cleaned that up we've replaced the fuse and so now is the moment of truth to turn this thing on and see if it smokes looking good so far the lights come on and there's no smoke so it's time to hook it up to a speaker is it actually going to make sound well not yet it's not I can barely hear something well this thing is going to need some electronic repair and hopefully it won't require any extinct icy chips but for now I'm determined to keep the momentum going so we started taking care of some other issues with the cs-80 powering on and struggling to make some noises they took stock of our situation we could spend lots of time fighting this thing hoping we don't zap anything poor we could call on a cs-80 superhero for help we called for the superhero to distance polio Carlos [Music] well folks we're here at an undisclosed location outside Phoenix Arizona getting some special keyboard fix that's not working at all the continuation of the yamaha cs-80 saga we're taking it to Boynton Park California where Yamaha exists and we're going to get one of their text that works on the vintage Yamaha gear to take a look at this and get it all the way working perfectly yep we're driving all the way to Southern California to get this cs-80 serviced by an expert someone who has knowledge and experience that goes beyond what's in the service menu he's the one who Yamaha calls on when they need any of their own vintage synthesizer serviced so we turned this beast over to the master and set up camp in Orange County [Music] between the dx1 in our last episode and now the cs-80 we have surely been enamored by vintage yamaha synthesizers and yamaha as a company as one of my favourites to do business with so while the tech is sesang out the CS ad we took the opportunity to visit Yamahas massive complex right down the road we're here at the Yamaha headquarters in Buena Park California and we're hoping to get a sneak peek inside the cent space which is a museum that Yamaha is set up for all their classic and modern day synthesizers we're locked out Wow I'm Keith Hirsch and I'm the marketing development specialist here at Yamaha first synthesizers and I'm a cheddar I'm the synth marketing manager here in the US and this is the sense face to see SATs oh okay when does 60 again okay yeah the suits are taking over we're running out of space actually nice more sense more sensitive space yeah [Music] GS 2 GS - yeah we found that I was just laying around that's what happened with us he has a deal with one of the CSA days yes yeah that's a nice day when you just wanted this abuse ideal either we had one of our employees had this and he donated debt to us why c-45 little is late for it - uh-huh this is from another one of our employees he had had this used to gig with that that's why - for years and years and stuff you don't see my job and we want a lot of fellow Texans and we got stuff we got this CP ad from a guy in Dallas what a cool place the early CS collection brings me back to the first synthesizer I ever bought new the cs5 and of course there's a CSA T the Yamaha vo one demo is extraordinary this is a physical modeling synthesizer that duplicates the physics of how blown tubes resonate and produce sound [Applause] [Music] [Music] the most amazing thing about this instrument is it behaves it behaves like a physical product like even or a physical instrument so even the way a brass instrument you know you change the embouchure and let you think of a bugle there's no there's no valves to change notes so you have to change your embouchure [Music] did you hear the notes that that goes through that's the third worst I've ever played I love it [Music] [Laughter] [Music] in a surprisingly short time the tech had dived into the ocean of wires and circuit boards removed another metal tang that may have shorted things out replaced four transistors and a proprietary Yamaha chip and had the C SAT playing notes the bad news is that several of the notes were not responding to aftertouch all of the sliders and switches need cleaning and this synthesizer definitely needs to be calibrated and those loose metal tangs they keep the keys from wobbling side-to-side and many of them have long since broken away there's a lot of work ahead and we're not sure how or even if some of these things can be fixed but to simply have the C SAT playing notes is a huge step forward now it's time to load this beast up and get it back to center headquarters where we'll do everything we can to finish up this restoration [Music] centaurs only open for half a day on Saturdays and Gerald doesn't work at all on the weekends but every now then he pops in on a Saturday for a little bit so this past Saturday he popped in started putting around started working kept on working kept don't work in said he's going to lunch he'll see me after lunch came back after lunch I thought my what a dedicated worker he is to come in on his day off and then about three o'clock in the afternoon when no one else was here except me he said where is everyone why didn't anyone working I said you know it's Saturday right and he wouldn't believe me he thought it was Friday and so today it's really Monday and so we played a little trick on him when Gerald was about to drive up we closed the blinds turned out the lights and everyone hid [Music] hey what you do in the armor send it continuous Sunday in here Abby again to go see her again Cena trying to manage are you sure yeah the damn fool was a man my work on Saturday of Sunday they tricked my hair's tell me is Tuesday hi this is Kayla and if you like cents Wizards click on like and subscribe so you don't miss a single episode and if you'd like to see more episodes of cent Wizards more often you can help make that happen and get some cool benefits as well click here to visit our patreon page with the cs-80 back in Texas we set it up in our show room where we could have easy access to it from all sides and began figuring out how we might tackle each of its remaining issues it's a unique project because it's pretty much a given that there will not be parts available for this thing there's a broken pot on the back panel there may be a slider that needs repairing several bulbs for the program buttons are out several keys need the aftertouch repaired many keys have broken guides and we have no stand for this 200-pound monster we're gonna tackle the easy things first build up our confidence and get to know the CSA D a little better several program buttons don't light up when they're selected and replacing those bulbs shouldn't be difficult and this is one part that we were able to find you can gently pry the switch cap off and then the bulb sitting in a rubber housing simply pulls out the bulb itself can then be slipped out of the rubber housing the new bulb goes in and the leads are threaded through the holes in the rubber trim the excess wire reinsert the rubber housing into the switch and let there be light the slide pots were another hurdle after four decades all of them were dirty so we built a special nozzle for our air compressor that would fit down into the slider to loosen up any dust and grit that had accumulated there after a good spray of compressed air we then vacuumed out each slide pot a shot of dioxin took care of any remaining trouble but one pot in particular just wasn't responding to our TLC the VFC level on synth 2 still has a dead spot when we try to adjust the filter either it has some really stubborn gunk inside or worse it has a damaged carbon track that's no longer making contact at a certain point so Carlos removed this slide pot so that we can disassemble it to get directly to the source of trouble the metal body of the pot has several tabs that Bend around the bottom and hold the whole thing together by carefully straightening these tabs you can pull the pot apart remove the bottom where the wiper contacts the carbon track and then clean the carbon track directly with a swab and some dioxin we're keeping our fingers crossed because if this doesn't do it we'll have to replace the slide pot and I don't know of any place on the planet that sells cs-80 sliders [Music] with the slide pot cleaned and reassembled it's going back into the sea SAT and wouldn't you know it it still got a dead spot I managed to find a slide pot that should work but it didn't have brackets on the end for mounting it to the front panel so I passed it on to Gerald in the next morning he had metal tabs epoxy to the ends of the pot this did the trick it all worked perfectly when you're restoring a vintage synthesizer and replacement parts aren't available creativity can make all the difference now that we've got the sliders working well it's time to go after the key bed and there are a lot of wobbly keys and somewhere the after touch works flaky or doesn't work at all and to be honest I'm not real sure if we're gonna be able to fix those things but Carlos is ready to tear into this so we'll see what happens the next big hurdle is one that I'm really worried about and that is to somehow replace all of the metal key guides that have broken away 12 of them have snapped off over the years of playing and two of them are what we found wandering about inside the see SAT shorting out electronics these guides have a felt jacket and they keep the keys aligned correctly without them the ivories wobble around horribly and I mean you can tell and by feeling once you actually get eyes on it becomes more intact the only way to get the keys working smoothly again is to somehow fabricate something to replace all of those broken guides so we began pondering what sort of metal fabrication might work and how we might attach it and then the next thing I know Gerald has brought in a couple of pieces he made from a recycled art keybed we just need to temporarily disconnect a few wires to get these new metal pieces into place but it looks like it'll work perfectly and now it's time to tackle the after touch a couple of keys did not respond to after touch at all a few others did but only marginally they weren't responsive it just wasn't as you know as responsive as I'd like it to be the black rubber piece underneath each key has a concave surface on the bottom and that surface is conductive as the key is pressed down harder that concave surface makes more contact with the circuit board underneath triggering more after touch the whole underside of this key bed is terribly dirty that's the actual precious tube right there okay look and you see yeah nice to do and did you see the goo but you can also see the contacts on it it looks like someone spilled a soda or something that seeped underneath the after touch pads precluding them from making good contact with the circuit board underneath even with rubber after touched contacts all cleaned up a couple of notes still won't respond at all it turns out that the circuit board was damaged also the traces leading to the after touch surfaces were broken so Gerald took the thinnest strand of wire he could find and bridged the gaps are you a now with the keys back into place this key bed feels fabulous instead of being wobbly and clunky now it's tight and smooth and the after touch works exactly as it should I'm super proud of Gerald and Carlos for getting the impossible done with the electronics working and the keybed feeling as good as new it's time to calibrate this beast and that starts with making sure the power supply voltages are just right this is a pretty easy step and a good way to ease into the rest of the calibration process which is complicated and tedious and taxing on the brain to get the voices calibrated you raise up a massive rack containing lots of different circuit boards eight of these our voice boards for the synth one section and another eight our voices for the synth two sections each of these voice ports has a multitude of trim pots and they all need to be set according to a very specific step-by-step process to calibrate the voices I needed some kind of a roadmap so I laid down a piece of tape and marked where each voice board was located then I had to identify the correct trim pod on each voice board for each step in the process once I had a good understanding of which pot to turn at which step I then had to make sure I was triggering the correct voice to match the correct trim pot on the correct circuit board this can give you a headache even before you start making a single adjustment we did find that one voice did not want to cooperate like it should we could almost get it tuned but not quite this could be due to a resistor or a trim pot being slightly out of spec so we adjusted for this by adding a resistor to that specific voice board after several hours of adjusting trim pots and annoying everyone else in the building I finally got this si si D playing nicely in tune the one thing we're still missing with the si si D is the stand and for that I turned to Tim and his crew at proline custom aluminum in San Antonio when we needed some unique eye catching stands for our noun booth Tim and his crew knocked it out of the park for the C SAT we need something like the original Yamaha stand something that'll hold up to 220 pounds so I sent Tim some dimensions and let him take it from there and he sure created something beautiful it's collapsible very sturdy very lightweight and the polished aluminum is gorgeous [Music] [Music] with our cs-80 repaired and calibrated now it's time for the exciting stuff getting to know it and getting to really play it it has so many cool features and I'm thinking Vangelis was right this certainly is at least one of the best synth designs ever filters are usually thought of as the most distinctive part of a synthesizer sound character and the cs-80 has independent high-pass and low-pass filters each with resonance then while the filters aren't edgy and squelchy like an MS 20 or are self resonating like just about every other synthesizer they're really smooth and beautiful in the combination of the high pass and low pass together is a very recognizable CS character [Music] [Music] a ring modulator is not unique to the cs-80 but this one is so musical and so playable that you can get lost for hours just ring modulating [Music] [Music] now check out the ribbon controller which lets you do some very cool pitch tricks again the cs-80 isn't the only synth with a ribbon controller but Yamahas is pretty unique wherever you touch it that becomes the zero point of your pitch excursions then you can bend upward and octave or you can bend downward by about four city blocks this single controller is definitely addicting [Music] and while just about every synthesizer ever made has portamento the cs-80 can also be switched to glissando mode where glides occur in half tone pitch steps how cool is that [Music] when Michael Jackson's Thriller exploded onto the scene in 1982 the yamaha cs-80 was used prominently on a number of tracks most of the keyboard work on the album was done by studio musicians but according to internet rumor the main synth riff on Billie Jean was played on a C SAT by Michael Jackson himself to get the inside scoop on this I called up someone who was there Michael barber one of the main keyboardists on Thriller I'm doing good how are you I got to tell you it's cool to talk to the person who created so many of the classic keyboard tracks we've all heard so I asked about Billie Jean in the cs-80 my understanding is that Michael Jackson played that for the for the riff on Billie Jean and that that's internet rumor at least in so I wanted to talk to someone who was that was there to kind of straighten things out but as it turns out Michael Jackson wasn't the only one playing that riff multitrack cs-80 which was not mineable and that had to set off sounds going so yeah - thanks of the pulse width modulation type string song and if I remember correctly even David had already been this and then I came in and we did uncle Daniel a Tercel then we did a prop and then there's people cs-80 ones with that same kind of pulse width modulation strength and then after I had our layer bars on Michael wanted to play the VNA so they were already used drink fillings on the track even patrons on the track these cars on the track Michael Broderick is on the track and Michael wanted to play smart and I said and so what I was going to do is try to recreate that in person then just play that a little riff on the C SAT here so yes Michael Jackson did indeed play the Billie Jean riff himself on a C SAT but it was one layer of probably five that were used to create the final sound and MJ's track was laid down after those other similar tracks were already recorded the sound you hear in Billie Jean is actually several different tracks of several different synthesizers layered together to get a big sound so on the C SAT for the synth one program I'm going to do I'm going to start with a square wave and then I'm gonna change the pulse width give it an arrow or pulse and then to get some animation I'm gonna give it pulse width modulation the other critical parts of the sound are the filter cutoff it's kind of a dark sound and then a fairly quick attack time and a bit of release time and with that dial then I just eyeballed a fairly similar setting for synth - we don't want it to sound identical just pretty close and so there's my synth - sound there's some fun and so now we'll just mix those together and that's pretty much it - play it like Michael Jackson though I have to use the chopsticks method but otherwise I'm gonna play it with my right hand so that I can also play the bass note that greg phillinganes played on a roads 88 [Music] you [Music] we've taken this yamaha cs-80 from a high-mileage broken synthesizer that smoked when it was powered on to a refurbished fantastic instrument that feels and plays as good as new it's such an amazingly expressive keyboard and holy cow does it sound good out of all the synthesizers that we've gone through here at centaur I've never wanted to keep one as badly as I want to keep this one but keeping them doesn't pay the bills so we'll see how that goes either way it's been a heck of a journey and it's easy to see why the yamaha cs-80 is on top of the list of centaur seven deadly sins [Music] [Music] [Music] gonna do the moonwalk force yes a hands ran out to moonwalk your hands and I'll really be guard somewhere y'all be moonwalking off their bars [Music] well folks we're here at an undisclosed location in the Phoenix area and we're delivering something of great significance to synth wizards it's Cody he recently got his degree in computer science took a job out here and now he's moving on to browner pastures Cody's the one that for a long time pushed for centaur to do a video series and synth Wizards as the result of that we're mighty proud of him but we're sure gonna miss it you

Channel: Syntaur

Views: 349,205

Keywords: yamaha, cs80, cs-80, analog synthesizer, synth, polyphonic, syntaur, synth wizards, synthesizer

Id: _poihkLM5Go

Length: 43min 5sec (2585 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 31 2020

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[u/synth4ever]

From video description:

"The Synth Wizards located the holy grail of polyphonic keyboards: a Yamaha CS-80. But the last time it was turned on, it smoked instead of made music. Did we pay thousands of dollars for a pile of parts, or will we end up with a magical music machine?"

[u/IgneousWolfgang]

This show has been putting my boredom on hold during lockdown!