Extremely rare this side of the Atlantic, the RMS Rivera mods for the Minimoog were the gold standard of Minimoog upgrades until Rudi Linhard came onto the scene to offer rival expertise from Germany. This RMS Mini has only just arrived at VEMIA - but we've now finished checking and servicing it before the auction. It's clearly been very well-used in its life. Notes from our tech James: 'The new owner will need a replacement chickenhead style knob for OSC3 Waveform choice. It was just slipping and I discovered not because of a loose grub screw but the knob is cracked. **NB We have ordered a replacement which will be fitted before we ship.**
Other than that I’ve cleaned the key bus and tines as best I can for more stability when playing legato.
Tuned VCOs to track much better across the full range.
Worked the pots to be less scratchy.
Ribbon controls Filter Frequency exclusively. Needs to be pressed very firmly for smooth sweeps.'
It's switchable voltage (UK at present), serial number 5898, and appears to have the nice version 2 oscillator boards (just 7 calibration points on the rear of the case).
RMS offered a long list of mods, and it looks like this example has gone for many (most?) of them: Fine Tune Control for two oscillators, LFO4 with frequency rate LED, Chromatic Transpose, VCO 2&3 Sync, Contour Control VCF/VCO2, VCO3, Distortion... probably a V-trig input jack, and maybe more to be discovered (the rest are largely invisible from the outside, but show up when used).
iI might even have the whole RMS package, which was $1087.95 - probably quite a lot more than the cost of a second-hand Minimoog (or Mini car) at the time. It comes with a recent good quality cover.
I realise this sounds a bit negative. This actually sounds and works great, and apart from the ribbon being a bit hard to keep smooth-acting, and the colour, it is a very good synth. Packing 15GBP.
