Mark 3 opinion and wanted schematics

[polyvoks]

hi all
member willedsmithmo asked me about mk3 working fine or not
Well the mk3 is really unreliable , the rhodes part is working fine but the synth part not . In fact the "synth" is based upon an electronic organ design with square
waveforms and one filter for each preset , for a very poor sound .
I'll put some sounds on my site in the future .
One problem is ,there is only one audio out summing the 2 different sounds , so you can't isolate each sound to give effect , and you can trust me that the "synth" need to be used thru phaser or chorus and reverb to be fine .
The split option is fine but of course you can't choose the split point .
The main problem is : if a part of electronic failed , you can't ear  the
classical rhodes sound , that's what happend to mine I've "lost " a complete note , fortunetely the highest D .
There is no option to use the piano as a classical stage without power up , it's impossible to acces only to the pure sound at the harp output , because pickups
wiring is different ,directly routing to the electronic .
So in the case of one day the electronic totaly failed the rhodes will be dead ,
because no sound at all ; exept if complitely rewired the pickup to reproduce the normal rhodes mk2 configuration.

I'M LOOKING FOR THE SCHEMATICS , THANKS IN ADVANCE .

see : http://olivier-grall.yusynth.net/instruments/Pianos/RHODES/page%20rhodes.html

[willedsmithmo]

The reason i asked was because pretty much all of them failed - though if you can find someone who has restored one (to better than new condition), it will be worth giving them an email. I have just PM'd grooveforhire, who have one but I don't know if theirs works.
 I think that actually making one work would be the job for a professional with time and money on their side. I have only ever seen one place with mk3 spares, and that was a dutch site which sold the circuit boards seperately.
I would say that the bottom line is: If you reaaly want it working, it is gonna be hard and expensive and it may never fully work. However always know that you have a rare collectors item there- and so its value is still very high.

[MikePeterson]

To convert a Mark III EK-10 to a basic Rhodes...

First, cut off all the wires leading to the PC boards.

Then, throw away all of the electronics. (Or keep them in a display case as mementos)

You will need to rewire ALL of the pickups. This can be tricky if you are not an expert with a soldering iron, they can be damaged easily.

They must be wired in a series-parallel scheme that I don't remember at the moment.

I have never done the mod, so I don't know if there is any reason why it would not work.

It seems to me that it would not be a hard job for an expert, but unless you have superior soldering skills, I would not recommend trying.

[polyvoks]

Many thanks for informations guys .
Well I think I'll prefer keep the MK3 as original , rewiring pickups and let down
electronics is not my way , I prefer service it . BTW it's working quite well exept
one note and some synths notes generating bizarre sounds .
I know how to rewire pickups , I did it already , I regulary service my rhodes .

About schematics I'm ready to pay for it . If anyone got it , please advise me ,
even offline if prefered .
Thanks

[nick]

hey dude,
sorry to say you just missed this on ebay...

http://cgi.ebay.com/Fender-Rhodes-mark-3-keyboard-owners-manual-original_W0QQitemZ230086967427QQihZ013QQcategoryZ1289QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

maybe try emailing the winner and see if he'd be willing to make you a xerox.

good luck and post some samples of it.  I've always wondered what these sound like.

[james]

I just tried to contact the winner through Ebay's system (since the winner isn't showing his email address to the public), and it blocked the message because I'm not involved in the auction transaction...Ebay member robertinel, if you're out there, please scan a copy for the Super Site!!!  We've needed that thing for years!!!!!!!!

[Ben Bove]

im pretty sure you can search that member, or if he's selling something else, you can "ask the seller a question" on his other item pages.

[Quatschmacher]

im pretty sure you can search that member, or if he's selling something else, you can "ask the seller a question" on his other item pages.

Yes you can, if you go to the "community" section you have the option to search for members, from there you can contact them. Or you could contact the seller to ask if he'll scan it before he ships it

[james]

I just did that, and it sounds like he's willing to do the scans for us.  That is, on one condition...that we use an EK-10 to blow up a PAL TV!  BTW, in case nobody's noticed it, the real stories of the EK-10 are told by guys from CBS on the Major Key website:

http://www.majorkey.com/cgi-bin/EK10.html

It didn't actually blow up the TV's in Japan, but it definitely had an effect according to John....

The EK-10 was shown on a local TV station in Japan, which uses the PAL system under NHK Japan, for a small demonstration of this unusual new electric piano. No big deal right? Well the EK-10, when played, caused a frequency interference that was never anticipated. Having designed the unit to operate a certain way, the design team unleashed a torrent of signal jamming clock signals that acted like wayward CB radios and bled through Public Address, Television and Night Club Amplifiers. This electromagnetic Godzilla was discovered to be the cause. In facing large return shipping costs, it was decided that these might be better suited for a unusual government project, an artificial reef where most of the pianos now lie quietly in the Japanese sea.

[MikePeterson]

If you want to preserve the Mark II EK10, but need advice...

Contact Paul Gagon at BBE/Major Key. He probably knows the answers.

He has a section on the Mark III on the site

http://www.majorkey.com/cgi-bin/EK10.html

[Steven K]

Hi Olivier,

Guess what I've got for you

http://www.vintagebua.no/Manuals/MarkIII%20Service%20Manual.pdf
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=30TRKEUV (same pdf, in case link above doesn't work)

Happy EK-10 hacking! Oh and please let us know what your findings are, because Marcel from EP service in The Netherlands (who I work with) also has a MkIII that we want to get working again some time in the future. Personally, I wonder how cool/doable it would be to construct some kind of useable MIDI output from the individual envelope generators.

Or maybe even drive a physical model with the individual pickup outputs directly, kind of like the Line 6 Variax. Who knows, we might get the EK-10 to sound like a Wurlitzer...

Cheers! Steven

[polyvoks]

Many many thanks !!! to you guys for supporting this subject .
specially to Steven and the links to the MK3 manual and schematics .
Perhaps this document could be added on the supersite , with approbation
of  VINTAGEBUA  of course .

. Thanks again .

Keep on preserving and playing RHODES guys .
OLIVIER

[Groove4Hire]

Hey guys. Sorry for not responding sooner... I'm in Los Angeles at the moment and there are lots of stuff to do Well, feel free to download the service manual from our site. It has all the schematics you need to service the Mark III.

We have a Mark III in our collection and against all odds it is actually working as it is supposed to if you don't mind a couple of scratchy potmeters that is... There are two Mark IIIs in Norway and we did extensive service work on the other to get the synthpart up and running. We used an insane amount of hours to get it stable and since we're enthusiasts we didn't charge the customer by the hour but thought of it as a "save the Mark III" project ;-) Eventually we got it up and running but they are really unreliable beasts... Good luck to all of you who wants to fix their Mark IIIs (you'll need it ;-))

[McCoy]

Hello everybody,

I have managed to setup my mark III ek10, which I bought on German ebay one year ago, and it works fine now, is reliable, I really love it and I'm gigging with it. I was lucky that a technician some years before worked on the piano and left the diagrams with the piano. I've posted them to the files section of the rhodes tech yahoo-group. Anyway lots of things didn't function and I had a lot of work with the instrument.

One problem is ,there is only one audio out summing the 2 different sounds , so you can't isolate each sound to give effect ...

Page 18 of the Service Manual says: "There is normally a jumper wire (with connectors) between E50 and E51. If his jumper is removed, the electronic voices will not be mixed with the normal RHODES sound at the output. The volume Pedal Jack can then be used as an output for the electronic voices." E50 and E51 you can find on he schematic on Page 25 Output mixing filter Part No. 017643 a little right above the middle of the sheet. The output mixing filter circuitboard is the one behind the mastervolume on the namerail.

The split option is fine but of course you can't choose the split point.

The Owners Manual says: " NOTE: Although the keyboard split is set between G and Ab, it may be changed to anywhere between E below Middle C and D# above Middle C. To avoid cancellation of warranty, this change must be made by a qualified designated technician." Cool, but even the Service Manual[] don't say, how it works. But in Fact there are two different diagrams for the circuitboards: Part No. 017545 is above split, 018070 is below split. And if you stare for some hours on your circuitboards and your diagrams you may find the difference between below and above, and if you meditate some more hours about what you see there, you may realize, what you have to change on the circuitboard to change the splitpoint. By the way - no chance to do this while you play a gig :lol:

The main problem is : if a part of electronic failed , you can't ear the
classical rhodes sound , that's what happend to mine I've "lost " a complete note , fortunetely the highest D .

For the highest D please look at the first circuitboard from the the right side of the Rhodes. It belongs to all the D#'s and D's of the Piano. There are twelve IC's in a row (Texas Instruments (TL082CDP), the first 6 seen from the right side belong to the D#'s, the other six to the D's. One of them,  the one in the middle of the board - No.7 from the right side -  belongs to the highest D. Try to follow the whole channel on the back of the circuitboard to see, if there are bad soldering points. On my boards I hat about 10 bad soldering points at those round brown things, that seat directly in front of the twelve IC's.  In this case it could be the round brown thing C 407 in circuit 7 on the above split diagram.
All the D's on the mark III have red pickup wires. Follow the red wire from the highest D, check the connectors, check the Ribbon Cable, that leads from he pickups to the circuitboard. These cables are really bad things. I've changed the long ribbon cable to a normal 26 pole computercable. The pins on the boards fit anyway and you can solder evey second core to ground.

There is no option to use the piano as a classical stage without power up , it's impossible to acces only to the pure sound at the harp output , because pickups wiring is different ,directly routing to the electronic .

I thought about the following modification: Just disconnect the six ribbon cables from the plugs, that leads to the pickups, take six new connecters and solder them to one wire, which you take as the pickup wire, like it is in a mark II, try to rebuild the volume control section from a mark II, maybe in some kind of extrabox outside the Rhodes, and you should be able to play the rhodes without powersupply. You could change everytime you want from powered mark III to not powered mark II just by changing the connectors. I haven't tried this yet, but maybe I will one day.

Personally, I wonder how cool/doable it would be to construct some kind of useable MIDI output from the individual envelope generators.

Yeah, that would fulfill my dreams!

If you can read german, check out this thread about the circuit boards, that I had with some german electronic organ freaks:
http://www.analogorgel.de/orgel/viewtopic.php?t=640
They helped me repairing ma mark III.

keep on rhoding,
McCoy

[Ben Bove]

wow, great insight into this hog.  thanks for that!

[polyvoks]

Hi , many thanks to member MC COY for those precious informations .
I  think that MK3's owners like me could be able to service this instrument now .
When my MK3 will be fully working I'll post some audio samples on my site .
Thanks guys .
OLIVIER

[hrees]

Can anyone post some mark 3 sound samples? I'd interested to know if it is worth getting hold of one. The idea of having another sound which accurately follows the rhodes dynamics is appealing. Also I'd be interested in knowing if it is possible to expand these things (midi etc).