I know how lucky I am to be able to say that I own a Moog Liberation. I got it from a 3rd hand owner, no case nor the 7 pin instrument cable, 20 years without use and loads of dust.
Lets get to the point: I managed to power it on, ending up with a soft constant tone coming out of the interface.. no keys pressed, simply two pure, high pitched tones coming out. no other response. I took it to a technician friend, got the service manual with the NORLIN INC Factory Service Bulletins and so, he found a few tracks interrupted in the control card the same morning I went there and the baby started to breath.
After some sliders and switches cleaning and a pretty clean job from my friend unmounting the 7 pin core from the conector on the keytar to eficiently conect both modules despite our lack of instrument cable, we heard the poly section start to work. not a great poly synth sound but im sure it will be a neat add once we get the two oscilators and the FORCE option wich is the so mentioned AfterTouch capability of this great synth.
At the end of that day, the results and actual status were:
Poly section working, including its tuning pot.
Filter working, great sound!!
All the keys work
Volume wheel works fine
Filter wheel works fine
Modulation wheel works fine
Now..
From the rest of the functions in the left hand module such as the ribbon, force amount and its switches i get no response
VCO
Both oscilators seem to be in a constantly gated state or something like that.
Thing is, when you open the signal from each oscilator in the mixer without pressing a thing, you can hear em freely oscilate. Octave and waveform seem to work fine on both, so does sync option. Logically (at least to me) ring modulation and noise generator freely generate an output in the same conditions.
Contour section is another case:
My friend repaired one of the broken 1K sliders, actually the attack slider of the filter contour section and it ended up working, obviously it would be better to replace the whole set of sliders but for now we are cleaning em with some electronic cleaner with lubrication.
the actual state of the contour section goes like this:
on the filter side, attack and sustain work, decay/release dont
on the amp side just sustain works, attack and decay/release dont
The FORCE sensor was actually disconnected so next session i will find out if it works. My friend says he have some similar opto sensors so i hope if its damaged we can replace it.. he is planning to finish following the schematics and start changing ic’s but maybe here someone can help us identify the origins of the problems and finally bring this jewel back to live.
THANKS IN ADVANCE
Ezequiel Pinedo
Audio Engineer / Producer
Merida - Venezuela
milesdavisrocks@gmail.com
+58 0274 4151412