Hi, today my AK started acting weird (I hadn’t powered it up for 3 weeks/a month, but the studio is on a UPS/power conditioner and there hasn’t been any thunderstorms or whatever), I had erraitic sounds with stuff going into a feedback loop and several keys not reponding. I rebooted several times, having USB and midi unplugged, finally it worked again but I still have one dead key. No sound, the led doesn’t light up when the key is pressed, and that particular key doesn’t send external midi either. Has anyone dealt with this too? Any suggestions before I open it up and take a look inside? (I’m used to open stuff up for repair, I’d rather do it myself than shipping the thing to Sweden… ) BTW, test mode gives no errors.
Thanks!
It’s always worth opening a support ticket with Elektron. Even if you choose not to send the AK for repair, support can give you tips that will help you diagnose the problem or perform a repair yourself.
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Yes, seems like the best place to start.
Yes I mentioned in my post I did run the test mode with no errors
i had this with the a4mk2 … not running it for a month, froze at boot, wierd sounds 2nd boot, dead at 3rd boot. unplugged everything. waited 2min, replugged and it was fine. only had that with the new firmware though.
Yeah, it was pretty much the same sequence of events.
you still have one dead key?
Yes, a good night’s sleep didn’t fix it 
So, one year later I fixed it myself. Initially support just told me to send it to Sweden but I didn’t want to support the cost. And I also took a break from music production (I’m also a photographer and had serious stuff to do) so I just put a blanket on it. Today I didn’t know what to do and took the whole thing apart. It was one of the soft key contacts, I believe. I say “I believe” because I can’t say for sure. It’s was definitely the keybed, and having checked the diodes and they were OK, there was not much else to check. They were quite some traces of generous contact cleaner spray, so I cleaned all the mess up and reassembled the unit.
Key still not working, so I dissassembled again and took apart the soft key switch mechanism of the offending key, It was clean, so I reseated the contact “pucks”, put it back and reassembled the unit: success!
It’s not rocket science but there are two connectors (the one for the joystick panel and the keyboard connector) that are really short so dissassembly/reassembly is a bit tricky and one must pay attention not to damage them in the process.
FWIW!
Cheers
PS of course I played a bit with the A Keys after this, it really is a nice sounding synth, I almost had forgotten how cool it is. Timeless!
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