I don’t know how it happened or even when it happened. I just know one day, I discovered the Kawai K4 I bought from eBay back in January 2005 wasn’t working.
I brought it down to Strait Music Co. to see if it could be repaired, and after waiting a month for the repair guy to get to my keyboard, I learned it was beyond hope.
About half an hour ago, I dropped $250 on eBay for another Kawai K4. I had attempted to bid on a few postings in the past few days, but I always got outbid. I hate the bidding process. Tonight, a seller included a "Buy It Now!" option, which is how I bought it the last time. So that’s what I did again.
Thing is, the K4 figures into only a few of my songs. Two of them — "Five (Ambiguous Friendships)" and "Hear the Wind Sing" — rely on it heavily. The thought occurred to me to stop depending on that synthesizer for those timbres, because who knows? I may find myself scouring eBay in another year looking for another replacement.
But it occurs to me that could happen with the other hardware synths I own. When my Kurzweil PC-88 crapped out, my first act was to jump on eBay to see how much it would cost to find a replacement, in the off-chance it couldn’t be repaired.
Honestly, I’m at the point where I would rather use software than hardware. If there were emulation for the Korg N364, Kurzweil PC-88 and Kawai K4, I’d use it.
But I know if the relatively newer synths reached a point where they couldn’t go on, I’d be hitting up eBay to find them all over again.