I was gifted a pretty worn Kurzweil K2000s (v3) from my partner who had it lying around for quite some time and I want to return it in better condition then it was given to me in. Was gonna get the keys fixed up/realigned and then possibly mod the floppy drive to accept usb's.


What else can I do with it? Anyone have experience with one of these?

Aside from rarely playing one of these synth/sampler monstrosities, I've got very little experience with them and am intimidated with trying to make patches. Sounds great though =)

 

Its alright for some aint it eh!!
Wish i had musician/programmer friends that would gift me their old stuff...

Id love to have one o them old beasts again........"hint hint"

 

SWEET! If you can make it USB compatible that would be pretty awesome. Can you do that with my Ensoniq Mirage??

 

I have 2 of them. great damn synths with a lot of legs considering the age....

 

You should replace the screen while you're at it. Look on eBay.

 

Yeah,a Jupiter 8 would be a nice gift.

 

had couple of them, amazing keys and especially sounds,
in case you'll be disassembling it, properly examine if there are some custom presets which may get removed permanently if you don't replace internal battery quick enough (at least I think it was with this model too),
I got some rack versions too, just for the sounds they're worth it too

 

Before the age of dinosaurs I had a K2500XS and totally dug the keyboard and the stock sounds. The sampling had a quirky but overall pleasing quality and was a blast to use. If you change the battery it would help to not have a possible blackout at an inopportune moment, and like Bluerover mentioned, try to change the screen. Adding more internal memory if it has a minimum amount would be the best thing. When these K models came out a Meg of RAM was like 30 dollars and unless one had silver lined pockets it could be cost prohibitive to max it out {outside the cost of the unit itself which you coulda swapped for a nice used car).

Have fun.

 

Ha, yeah, I remember loading mine up with 16mb's.... one of my units I remember finding a computer on the damn street someone had tossed (it was later in the k2000 life, ~96) and I just stripped the ram out and it worked fine...

My trick to getting samples from my mac or whatnot with them later on in post-scsi time, was to use zip drives. I had one that was scsi, and one that was usb.... so i would drag stuff over from my mac or whatnot to the usb one and sneaker net it over to the k2000 hooked up to a scsi zip drive... it worked... also had a cd rom drive hooked up that would read akai disks....

it was a great synth, sampler for me, has a TON of options obviously... and the manuals were like calculus textbooks...

 

Evev if you don't use samples, the VAST synthesis is very, very powerful.
Worth investing some time.

 

K2000's were awesome sampler/synths back in the day. I always wanted one but they were way out of my budget back in the 1990's.

 

I think that I still have a scsi (pronounced scuzzy fir the youngins not in the know) Zip drive hidden away in some storage box that I just couldn't get rid of, now like 25 years past their need.

 

Yeah, I still have them too! in storage at least... i still have my first 1gb (!) scsi drive I paid ~$1900 for or so back in 1992 lol....