Fixing my Roland S-220 sampler floppy drive

This lovely piece of gear (circa 1987) was my very first sampler. I purchased it second hand in 1992 so it was borderline "vintage gear" even back then. Alas its 30KHz at 4 sec maximum sampling capacity was no match for the crisp sounds in my Roland JV-80 but it was fantastic to learn sampling on. It also taught me just how much of a difference having your own sounds can make on a track.



So you can imagine my utter horror when I turned it on recently (after many years of sitting in a rack case in storage) and heard this horrible continuous grinding noise. And I hadn't even plugged it into the mixer!!! Just between you and me this baby is one of my prized possessions so it was quite a tough decision to get out the screwdriver. Especially since I have a history of not being able to put stuff back together.



After a little research I discovered that the floppy drive is usually the first thing to go in equipment of this age group. Mainly because the drives were belt driven. This was the case for my sampler but with a twist! The belt had managed to fuse itself to just about anything it could find. In the picture above you can see that it's melted all over the main fly wheel.



With a little patience and a bunch of cotton tips I managed to clean the remains of the belt off ok. The next trick was finding a suitable replacement for the belt. Working out exactly what to use has been a little difficult but I'd read that video player belts make good replacements in the drives of other synths (such as the Yamaha SY-85). Unfortunately I haven't been able to track one down yet so I've put this orange rubber-band in as a temporary measure.

Amazingly it's working really well now. All of my quick discs load without a glitch so I've finally able to get all my old samples onto my laptop in SysEx format. Converting them to wav files should be a simple matter of using one of the utilities from the Roland S-10 Manager software package. I'm hoping that I can use that package to copy and paste settings, like loops points and key assignments, into Ableton Sampler.

My old sample library will be revived in all it's awesome lo-fi-ness! This time, however, it'll get the star treatment with Live 7's awesome effects! Can't wait! Will let you know how it goes.