AK key discolouration

Elektron Gear Analog Keys/Four
#1

The weirdest thing happened as I moved my Analog Keys from the sidelines to the main spot on my table. I guess it has been slowly happening, but I noticed it just now that it’s right in front of me that one of the keys (only one of them) has started to slowly turn yellow. 36 keys are white, but this one key has started yellowing. My Keys hasn’t been in a smoky environment or in direct sunlight and certainly if it had it would’ve affected all the keys equally.

Am I losing my mind? Anyone else experienced something similar?

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#2

Yep, mine looks the same.

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#3

Is it the same key? H in the middle?

#4

Surprisingly not. It’s B4 on mine, one octave lower than on yours.

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#5

It’s not stopping me from loving my synth or anything but it’s just a weird thing that one key would go yellow and the others stay white. I’ve had plenty of yellowed out keys on my vintage gear back in the day but they were all consistently yellow.

Almost seems like that one key is made of different type of plastic or something weird.

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#6

Ha! It’s actually the opposite case on mine, all except B4 have some slight discoloration! I couldn’t see it properly first when I checked, because I had only one light switched on.

There was never a broken key or something like that on my AK. Seems like maybe they switched to a different type of keys and some AKs where assembled using both types?

Kinda weird, though, that on my AK it’s the same key just an octave lower that’s different, but in the opposite way^^ :rofl:

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#7

Hah! That’s funny. Maybe we should do a swap. I’ll send my yellow one to you and you’ll have a beautiful all-yellow kb and you do the opposite and I’ll have an all-white one. It’s a deal!

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#8

I guess we could actually do that! Nice solution for such an odd ‘problem’ :rofl:

Have to check if it’s easy to disassemble the keybed, but, yeah why not.

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#9

Yeah. Let’s not rush into it. It’s tempting but I’ve never opened my AK and don’t know a thing about it’s insides. When I still had my Polysixes etc. I needed to open one of them almost weekly to get the keyboard working etc. It became second nature and that’s one of the reasons I got rid of them and bought Elektron machines in their place.

I haven’t opened up any gear in years unless you count the Tascam 244 which I fixed last summer. The thought makes me mildly anxious. Is it a Fatar keybed in there?

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#10

there might be more/other pictures on the web but found this one the other day, thought i would post it in here too, just in case :smiley_cat:

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#11

I’ve got a front tooth that’s yellower than the rest so your picture of the AK was oddly familiar to me… :laughing:

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#12

Odd that one key is doing that, because I always thought that it’s sunlight that does this?

There are solutions that are supposed to remedy this, I think one is called “Retrobright”

My Pro 2 is by a window, and I used to make sure the drapes were down during the day to keep it from picking up sunlight through some very old glass windows.
But we just got all new windows, new Pella windows that block out some 84% of UV. I wonder if its okay to keep it near these new windows, because I do like that natural light.

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#13

More info here about plastic discolouration:

I checked my AK but did not notice any individual keys yellowing, but there may be some slight overall discolouration.

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#14

Fatar TP/9S unweighted afaik. Btw, wouldn’t Elektron send you a new key?

I’ve never had to deal with broken keys on any keyboard, but after a quick google search it doesn’t seem like replacement parts for the TP/9S are easily available?

Btw, it seems kinda odd that my keys even discoloured (it’s not really bad, but the single bright white key is clearly noticable amongst the slightly yellow one), because I always have covers on my gear and this side of the house doesn’t even gets much sun.

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#15

I’ve had this happen on various synths. I’ve always assumed (for used purchases) that a past owner had a key replaced and some how that key was of lesser quality. Very odd on something as new as the AK though.

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#16

I had 2 Analog Keys.
One turned yellow (evenly), one stayed white.
For no reason, they have been in the same room.
With those unevenly colored keys I guess they mixed up different batches of keys.
It‘s disappointing that the quality of the parts is so inconsistent. Same with the displays.

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#17

Not sure if we can blame Elektron for this, though. How should they have known about a bad badge of keys?

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