A few months ago, my client, Lee, brought me this old Emu Emulator II to fix up that he purchased from an estate sale in California. It did not work. Both disk drives were missing, the inside was rusted out, and everything else was caked in rotted road case foam. There was a curious Deadhead sticker on the back of it.

 

Weeks after Lee brought it to me, he emailed me a photo he found while doing some research. Was this Emulator owned by Brent Mydland of the Grateful Dead?

Doing further research, we discovered Brent used the Emulator for just a couple of years in the mid-Eighties before switching to a Kurzweil Midiboard in 1987. If you watch the video for Touch of Grey, you'll recognize the Emulator by the sticker on top of the disk drive area.

 

The sticker on the back of this Emulator seems to line up exactly with the sticker in that picture. There's no sticker on top of the disk drive, but there's a circle shaped residue of the same size. I contacted Bob Bralove, who was Stevie Wonder's MIDI guru, and was the sound technician for the Grateful Dead when Brent played the Emulator. Bob asked some of his former colleagues to see if anyone had a recollection of this particular Emulator.

Unfortunately, there's no record of that serial number, or what happened to the Emulator after Brent switched to the Kurzweil. No one I've contacted is really sure where his

Emulator ended up after his death in 1990.

The Emulator actually powered on when I first tested it, but would not boot up without a disk. One of my tasks was to install a solid state USB drive preloaded with boot files and sample libraries. After I installed the drive, I was able to engage just enough of the panel buttons to load the OS and access the sound files, but I still wasn't able to get any audio from the Emu's output. After doing some work on the power supply, I was finally able to see audio on the oscilloscope!

 

The 5.25" disc drive you see pictured is only a dummy drive, used to fill the space for the

other drive slot. Only the solid state drive is operational.

Both the master output and input gain potentiometers were totally rusted. I replaced both pots with new ones. The LCD display worked, but there was no longer any backlight. Fortunately, I was able to find an LED backlit replacement in green, and bypass the inverter used to power the original high voltage electroluminescent element.

I took apart the key bed, and let all of the keys soak in soapy water for a few days. I also cleaned all of the rubber contacts and the contact PCB. All of the rusty parts and hardware were scrubbed with Naval Jelly, and sprayed with grey primer. Several of the back screws were replaced with stainless steel screws.

 

This Emulator looks like it sat on the beach inside a road case for decades! All of the 1/4" jacks were full of rotted foam. I was able to clean out the jacks by popping off the tops, scaping with a dental tool, and vacuuming.

 

Not only were there black spots all over the chassis from the road case rot, there was a lot of evidence of old gaffers tape on the Emulator II logo, and some on the panel graphics. There was also evidence of white paint splatter. I was able to remove most of it with some Goo Gone and water. I kept the sticker on the back untouched, and left the circle shaped sticker residue on top of the disk drive.

Here are some before photos, and pictures I took during the restoration. Click for larger images: