My DIY 90's Synth Rack!

[Aleksi]

A four day weekend well spent! I finally built a rack for my small collection of 90's romplers. The materials for the rack itself were about 50€, so a fairly inexpensive build. The connector panel and D-type connectors bring the price up a bit, but it was well worth it for the convenience.

There's an ART MX822 line mixer and a panel on the front that brings the XLR outs from the mixer to the front of the rack. There's also a MIDI in on the front for convenience and I'm going to add a dual USB-A connector for USB power. I'm thinking of bringing the fx loop connectors to the front as well, so I can plug in pedals.

The synths:

• E-MU Proteus 2000 (with Protozoa, Vintage Keys and B3 ROM cards)
• Korg Wavestation SR
• Roland JV-1080 (with Asia, World and Vocal expansions)

Here's the front of the rack:

Here's the back:

There's a basic rack mount power strip with two USB C power outlets. A MIDI Solutions Quadra Thru is handling MIDI and is connected to the front panel via a cable that is soldered directly to the D-type MIDI-connector. In hindsight, I probably should've just put 6U strips in the back as well, they're literally the same price But oh well, probably won't be mounting anything else in the back anyway.

 

[sleewell]

yoooooo this is sweet, great work.

im still a noob to all this stuff, how do you control them? via a midi controller or the front panels or ? would love to hear you cook if you have any clips.

 

[Aleksi]

yoooooo this is sweet, great work.

im still a noob to all this stuff, how do you control them? via a midi controller or the front panels or ? would love to hear you cook if you have any clips.

These are preset machines for me so I mostly just navigate the presets and other mandatory stuff on the front panel (pretty much any modern synth has a better UI )

I use my Oxi One mkII sequencer for jamming and I sometimes include some keyboard playing, but I'm not exactly a player.

I haven't done much jamming with these synths, mostly just messing around and finding sounds that were used in video games lol That's really why I built the rack so that I would actually use them for something instead of keeping them in the closet.