Comments on: Inside The Korg DW-8000: Don’t Put Solder on a Battery

By: Grant Muller

Grant Muller — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:51:00 +0000

I must admit that my skills with repairing this unit end with the battery. I really don’t know much about that digital delay unit.

By: Jpsmba

Jpsmba — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:58:00 +0000

Dear Sir:

The digital delay in my DW8000 suddenly stopped working. Everything else works fine. Any ideas? Thank you.

By: frank

frank — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:22:00 +0000

can you please tell me if there is an internal battery on korg pa 60??? im having some problems not booting all the way.. and i want to see if thats the reazon…. thansk … sincely.. frank!!!!

By: Fabrizio

Fabrizio — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:36:00 +0000

Thanks for sharing this, Grant. I did the mod based on your blog and Bryan Ressler’s website and restored my DW-8000 to working order. I made a video overview of the process too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrzfMNjXvDQ

By: Yash

Yash — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 06:27:00 +0000

I've decided to solder wires to that battery location on the board instead. I routed the wires through the leftmost slot of the heat vent so that the ends can be reached outside. For now I've taped a new battery outside the lower casing half.

Would you know of any mod to the DW-8000?

Thanks.

By: Grant Muller

Grant Muller — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 12:50:00 +0000

Yeah. The battery is there to keep the internal sound bank active. When the battery dies, the sounds are lost. You have to replace the battery then reflash the internal storage (via the tape/sysex mechanism) from what I understand.

By: k03l

k03l — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 23:45:00 +0000

would the battery have anything to do with the keyboard making no sounds?

By: nitro

nitro — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 19:24:36 +0000

Hi,

I decided to try to repair my dw8000 myself. It was having some problems with the keyboard not triggering and the data slider sticking. So I opened it up and took it apart. when I got the pc boards off the bottom tray I saw a lot of rust and corrosion, so I am treating the rust as well. I thought the key trigger problem might be with the contacts on the board buss, but when I took it apart it looked really clean. I realized that there is a lot o wiring in his baby, I downloaded the schematics, but can't tell from them what goes where. Can you help me? Would it be possibly to show some pictures from a board that has been opened up so I could label the wiring? can you perhaps figure out what board is connected to what? I can see the power supply where it goes but I'm not so sure if the keyboard buss goes into the control surface or do they both go into the pc boards? If you don't know I will try to reassemble trial and error.

By: Grant Muller

Grant Muller — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 16:49:45 +0000

To be honest I have no idea how to reload the patches on this guy from tape, but it looks like its just doing a sysEx dump via MIDI. You may be able to hook it up to a computer and load the factory patches via an editor on your machine, here is a link I found on the subject:

http://www.deaf-eddie.net/ex8000/ex8000.html

That link contains the factory patches in SysEX format as far as I can tell as well. I did the repair for a friend and I don’t actually know much about the DW-8000, and I don’t have one around to test this on either. Let us know if you’re able to do it via a patch editor…

By: Norm Sparks

Norm Sparks — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:26:18 +0000

While I wait for the battery holder to show up and have set a new battery into the board temporarily perhaps you can advise on reloading the original programs from Korg tapes. One is marked DATA sides A&B and the other Programs sides A&B both on cassettes. Having taken a sidebar to get my dual cassette unit up and running I now have a question on the actual tape feed in to and?or out of the tape deck into the DW. The tapes were never used from new and the manual seems to lack info on the basic programs. The unit was shelved years ago when the Dealer said it was scrap. Guess they either wanted to sell me a new one or didn’t know about the battery. At present the keyboard is active and all keys work in some sort of random selection process but the basic program is missing to due the dead battery. Any advise with please and thanks.