One of the downfalls of products from the early 80’s is the crap plastic they made a lot of stuff out of, and the putrid shades of slightly green beige it turns over time as the fire retardant bromine migrates out of it.  I bought this Piano Plus 11 off craigslist while I was restoring the Juno 60 to steal the key bed and maybe some buttons, sliders and other components out of.  I got it home, spent some time horsing around with it, and decided I just couldn’t kill such an interesting thing, so I just swapped its perfect key bed for the slightly glitchy one in the Juno 60.  What’s so interesting about it you ask?  Well, it has built in drum patterns, bass accompaniment and a kick-ass arpeggiator – all with a din sync out to drive other stuff.

This did 18 months of solitary confinement in my closet while my wife’s pregnancy progressed and then while the boy grew as I did late night/early morning diaper shifts.  One day I came across it while looking for some shoes and realized this would be a great first keyboard for a kid, so I pulled it out and sized it up.  The plastic cheeks -similar to a Juno 106 and JX-3P were offensive, so I decided to get some wood cheeks made.Here’s the nearly finished product.  The wood cheeks make the cream colored panel a lot more acceptable.  Yes, that’s a VP-330 under it, more on that later. Continue reading →