I'm continually receiving requests to install various upgrades into all the instruments featured on my website but in the past few months, I've had to turn my lab into a Roland MKS-70 full upgrade production line, just for this machine!
I'd planned to take August off, this year. No, not for a fancy holiday or even a romantic get-away to somewhere exotic and beautiful with my wife (sorry, Julie). The truth is that I had taken on a lot of R & D projects and I really wanted to get them finished. I was finding it difficult to focus on other things in my life. I couldn't even just relax.
As it turned out, I was quite ill in August as I succumbed to a chest infection. In fact, I ended up in hospital. 🙁 As such, I decided to slow down and August got stretched out to mid-September. My customers were amazing and allowed me to peacefully recover. I felt quite guilty though and so decided to leave my online store, open.
Well, however nice and understanding people are, they can't wait forever and as soon as I felt good to go, I cracked on with a small backlog of customer repairs and upgrades that had built up.
I also finished off my projects, making the executive decision to leave my Nebula-X balanced outputs jack-board for the Roland JX-10 'till Christmas. Hey, the prototype is all built but I still need to fully test it and document the results.

Winter 2023 was a crazy MKS-70 period, one which I never thought would have been repeated. Oh how naïve! Almost a year later and I've had to set up my Roland MKS-70 full upgrade production line again.
I've had a couple of MKS-80s in too. Both had faults which I've had to fix and the owners have also requested Aurora to be to installed.
It looks like things are going to get busy in the studio too. Booked up until February next year, I wasn't really looking to take on anymore recording or production work. A few days ago however, a friend of a friend approached me, asking if I'd consider producing several of his latest songs.
Hmm... I think I might need to get a plan together...
UPDATE - 28th October 2024
Here on the bench, is the last in this run of MKS-70 full upgrades. All the way from beautiful Finland, Nebula was fitted over the weekend and now I only have the front panel switches to change, the GU280 VFD to install and the encoder to swap out. Testing will take a few days so I guess this will be on it's way home by the end of the week. 🙂