A couple of years ago I built a modular synthesizer based on circuit designs from Ray Wilson and Ken Stone. Last summer I built an additional synth cabinet with the intention of adding a bunch of new modules from several other DIY synth gurus. For some reason it’s taken me almost a year to get motivated enough to start building modules, but the first two are finally ready. These are actually Ray Wilson circuits that I couldn’t fit in the first cab, but I’m short on envelope generators so I decided to build these first. I’ve also got a Ray Wilson sequencer that I’m hoping to finish next. After that it should be all new circuit designs, including quite a few of Thomas Henry’s circuits.

I got a ridiculously good deal on a Juno 60 synth over the holidays. For an instrument that’s nearly as old as I am it’s in surprisingly good shape, but it’s lack of MIDI soon became a problem. I’m a fairly poor synth player, so I rely heavily on MIDI so that I can program parts that I’d never actually be able to play in real life. No MIDI left me stuck with my rather limited abilities whenever I wanted to use the Juno in a song.

The Juno 60 was released about a year or so before MIDI became the standard and instead has Roland’s own MIDI-like DCB protocol. There have been several DCB to MIDI adapters released over the years, but they’re all big clunky boxes. If I was going to add MIDI to my Juno, I wanted it to be built into the synth and not in some external box I would have to lug around.

After a little hunting I found Engineers@Work, a company in the Netherlands that had exactly what I was looking for. They sell an add-on board that can be soldered into the existing DCB wiring to convert the DCB signals to MIDI. It even fits into the same hole as the old DCB connector so I didn’t have to drill any new holes in the Juno.