Hacking the Kurzweil music keyboard to workaround a bad key
Note: Only a tiny sliver of the Internet population will need this information. So if you are not a vintage Kurzweil music keyboard owner, pass by!
But if you do have a Kurzweil 2000 series keyboard, such as the K2000, K2500, and K2600, pull up a chair and hear me out.
Kurzweils are awesome synth workstations. I’m brand-loyal to them. My first keyboard was a K1000, which I played for many years then moved on to a K2500x, which I still own. A couple years ago I found a good deal on a new PC3K, and added that to the studio.
There is, however, a known problem that occurs with these keyboards as they grow older — misbehaving keys. A key will trigger at full velocity or not at all when pressed. You get the loudest possible sound or dead silence. This has to do with a hardware vulnerability — rubber strips in the guts of the Kurzweil can crack or tear, and a tiny bit of dust can creep in and foul it up.
I don’t want to go into hardware details, because I’m not proposing how to actually fix that, and I’m no expert. Trust that it CAN be fixed, and this YouTube video shows you how. As you can see, it’s not for the faint of heart!
