Before you contact us…

I am glad that you are considering my shop to restore your vintage synth gear! I want you to know that all are welcome here regardless of their celebrity status, regardless of what the rumors are in this town.

Having said that, I want to touch upon not only how we believe our customers should be treated, but also how we believe our customers should treat us.

To preface that, I want to bring you back to the days to the days these synths were made. Back when people with particular and rarely mastered skills were treated with the upmost respect and trust. The old-school days of skilled tradesmen. They are the “dying breed” we so often hear about, and we’re following in their footsteps.
I’m here to tell you they’re dead because the customers killed them.

Today we now live and are accustom to a new era of instant gratification. Anything you’d like in varying degrees of quality can now be had the same or next day, delivered to your door at rock bottom prices. At every corner there is a store that will fix your phone for the same price as the guy across the street. Todays tradesmen will “price match” a lower quote just to win a job, even if they know they can do a better job.
That’s not us. We’re living in the past.

We are not the lowest bid you will find for synth work, that I can assure you. We do believe we are your best option for high quality work, and we will not lower our standards or rates for anyone. We only use quality parts we believe in and we do NOT cut corners.

To us, our customers represent human beings with names and stories. We do not treat our customers like numbers or another line in the ledger. We don’t know your invoice number… we know your name. We know your gear and sometimes we even know who owned your gear before you owned it along with that person’s story.

We want to be excited about restoring your synth. We want you to be excited about us restoring your synth. We can’t do that without your respect for our process. We didn’t get to where we are by being lightning fast or cutting corners. Thats not us.

Yes, proper work takes time. No, your job wont be done in a week. It may not even be done in a month. We may spend 2 weeks straight working on your synth only to hit a complex wall and need to take a short break from it to clear the head. This is the reality of vintage synth work. If you think poking us will make us work faster, think again.

We are thrilled to work with you and thrilled to work with your gear. We don’t need you to kiss our feet. We just need you to not get weird or entitled. Just be cool! If you believe “the customer is always right”, I can guarantee you that you will have a very bad experience with us. Usually and almost exclusively the customer is almost always wrong about whats wrong with their gear, what will fix it, how long it should take, and how extra important they are as a customer. There’s exceptions to that of course, and it would be silly to imply we’ve never made an honest mistake, especially with our scheduling. When it’s on us, we’re very giving.

I can’t stress how easy it is to have a good experience having your nice gear restored. Make the inquiry, get the estimate, read the estimate, be realistic, and pay your bill when it’s done. If you can sprinkle in a good conversation, even better.

We reserve the right to live in peace

– Rob Rosen

Red flag hall of fame

Tell us how you *chose* us to give us the job when you could have gotten it done cheaper and faster somewhere else.
Complain about how long a complicated repair is taking by stating that you are certain that a certain about of time that has passed should have resulted in a completed repair. Bonus points if you don’t want to pay for all the hours we’ve spent troubleshooting.
Complain about how you see other gear being worked on on our instagram. This ignores so many aspects of the repair process I could write a whole post about it.
Mention that you brought us a nice bottle of something in hopes that you’d be pushed through
Accuse us on sitting on your gear when really sitting gear does not benefit anyone at all and is a silly accusation
Bring emotions into the repair process. It’s a recipe for disaster.
Tell us it’s almost your birthday and ask us to please finish it before your birthday. If you are over the age of 15 this is probably the most ludicrous thing you can say to working professionals
Mention our few bad Yelp reviews as somehow the trend in comparison to the much higher rate of positive ones (note: we are not a yelp based business).
Complain about how long your repair is taking when your friend got his much simpler repair done in no time at all
Complain about turn around when parts availability is the problem. Bonus points if you believe a certain amount of time should entitle you to the world producing a rare part for you. 3x bonus points if you believe we should take the part from another customer or our rental gear to serve you faster (we will never do this)
Ask us to only fix a certain part of a synth because you don’t care about the rest of it
Trivialize the process. Often times a one liner description of a job like “calibrated the filters” can take a lot of time and energy. Saying “theres no way it takes that long to do that one thing” is probably the easiest way to have us end a business relationship.