Category Archives: Music

Kurzweil K2000R display retrofit

Music, Synths

After a long break I’ve decided to retrofit my K2000R. I still had a few white-on-black displays on the shelf, purchased from artronic.eu:

http://artronic.eu/pl/p/LCD-AG-240064A-DIW-WKK-E6/1035

The process was actually really easy. The new display has a 1-1 pin layout. No additional pull-up or down wires or resistors were required.

using a desoldering tool to remove the tin from the pin
almost done..

I desoldered the ribbon connector from the old display, and resolderded it onto the new display.

On the backlight driver board, I desoldered the Q1 driver transistor and transformer. The supply voltage to the backlight driver board is an odd 7V. I decided to use an 100Ohm resistor in series. At 80mA the drop voltage will be around 4V, leaving 3V for the LED backlight.

I shorted the VCC to a (former) transformer pin, from which the resistor guides the current to the backlight LED.

The contrast was quite a bit of after replacement, but the range in the menu is quite large, so dialing it down from +14 to -20 did the trick.

end result

On the pictures the image looks white on blue, but it actually is white on black. I’m very happy with the result!

Little light of Love

Music

Last night I watched the movie ‘Fifth Element’ from Luc Besson again. This movie has a great soundtrack by Eric Serra, espacially the track ‘Little Light of Love’. Watch/listen it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5PFsP-Bux4

After doing a little searching on the internet it seems a lot of people believe this track is produced by Peter Gabriel and Thomas Dolby. I also remember having this track in a bundle of Thomas Dolby songs I’ve downloaded some years ago.
Here is one of these downloadsites: http://beemp3s.org/download.php?file=757024&song=Little+Light+of+Love
One source which is cited a lot is: http://www.moviemistakes.com/film472/questions

So where does this come from?
The voice in the song does have a few aspects in comon with that of Peter Gabriel.. and the whole atmosphere is in the line of what both Peter Gabriel and Thomas Dolby produce.
Also discussed here: https://petergabriel.com/forum/3/peter-gabriel/topic/350036/aint-that-peculiar-by-peter-gabriel-rare-unavailable-on-cd/
and here: http://forum.thomasdolby.com/viewtopic.php?p=36700#p36700
And a mention of it here on Andy J’s Guide to Thomas Dolby (search for ‘fifth element’ here)

So we can conclude Peter Gabriel and Thomas Dolby didn’t have any involvement in this track. It is a track produced and performed by Erric Serra himself (credited as R.X.R.A.. which is ‘Eric Serra’ phoneticallt). It seems someone (hunkydorey2) had a bunch of tracks, among which ‘little light of love’ assuming it must be Peter Gabriel´s voice and put it ip for download in the early years of internet. Since then it has gone viral. Anyone who has more insight on this perhaps?