I take out my trusty old DR-660 drum machine from time to time especially for acoustic drums.  The acoustic drum samples always sound great to me. I am not sure how Boss/Roland did this in 1996 but the pitch-shifting sounds extremely natural.  So tuning a cymbal on the DR-660 actually produces a cymbal sound instead of a high-pitched blip or a low-pitched car crash sound.

Alas when I recently turned it on, it said Battery Low!  It should probably say Battery Dead! instead.   It turns out I needed a 2302 coin battery for replacing the old one, and a few simple tools.

There are two useful videos on Youtube for this repair.  This one is more detailed about opening the 660 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFIlnb0GHKk).  The second one is very brief but shows how to “hook” the battery out from the far side (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nxEHPCfyG8).  I used a small L-shaped Allen wrench to hook the battery from the back.  Then I used a needlenose pliers to set the new battery in place and pop it in.  I powered up the 660 and there was a message something like Backup NG, Press Enter. NG I take it means Not Good.  The manual said this error was due to the memory being lost.  Pressing enter re-initialized the 660.

Fortunately I had backed up the 660 some time ago.  I use a program called C6 for a lot of my MIDI activities.  Transferring the back up to the 660 using C6 did not work.  The 660 just sat there and did not respond.  A second program called MIDI OX did the trick.  When sending the back up, the 660 said Receiving Sysex.   A short time later the 660 was back to its old self.

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