I was given this keyboard to fix as some keys/patches didn’t work and it was in a bit of an untidy condition. On opening the case, there are three joined circuit boards, one of which had cracked along its join ( primitive solder joints ).
I had to make good on some of the PCB tracks to re-connect a few traces and cleaned the contacts.

There was already a headphones output jack and so I connected it up through my studio inputs and started listening to the sounds that were available.

One big surprise was that the ‘Organ’ sound was unexpectedly good when played through my system and so just for that sound, I decided to sample the main patches to use with Decent Sampler.

I also did some research into the instrument so I could find out more about it if at all possible and after a google image search, turned up the ‘Hing Hon EK-001’ – suggested to be one of the last ‘square wave’ generator keyboards that were made – but also noted is the great ‘Organ Sound’ which kind of confirmed what I had heard in the first instance.

So I set about creating a Decent Sampler version of the sound patches in this synth. Some are reasonable, some not so much, however with some judicious tweaking of ADSR, Chorus, Filtering and reverb, I think the sounds have elevated somewhat.

There are 4 ‘Drum’ Pads on the top right of the synth that are meant top emulate Kick, Snare, Hats and Percussion. However, I couldn’t be sure which ones were which, but to be somewhat complete I have added these to 4 lower keys that appear on every patch just for completeness. I would think that with some further audio processing these percussive sounds could be enhanced into something nearing useful.

So here we have it – a free instrument to kick off my Decent Sampler journey – if I can find some time an/or get some positive responses for this synth, I could enhance the original sounds to make some more interesting patches – There is also a microphone input jack on this synth and I don’t know if it works but I can also explore sound shaping through that!

Best regards and happy creating!

Tim – TGE Soundlabs

Contributors

TGE Soundlabs

Samples taken through built in headphones jack using Sample Robot Pro