AR1 weird pad behaviour

The pads on my AR1 show some weird behaviour - they seem to react in a random way sometimes, especially in mute mode: e.g. when i press bt5 to mute, it mutes bt5 AND bd1, but not vice versa. It seems they are kind of linked. I can’t find a way to remove this very annoying behaviour.
Is this a bug or is there some “grouping” setting i don’t know?
Thank you for your help!

Sounds buggy, maybe send in a support ticket.
I vaguely remember reading about this happening when they first came out.
Maybe an OS update?
I’ve always had great responses with Electron support.

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could be a bug, power supply maybe? or might need to be fixed
would try test mode then maybe reinstall/upgrade OS

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Ok, I will try support. Damn.
Thank you all!

Known issue on a lot of devices (more common on Mk2 maybe?), seems to be related to the increased sensitivity of the pads in mute mode. Not sure if the most recent software update addresses it specifically, but there are a LOT of posts about it in the big Rytm bugs thread.

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This is indeed a known problem. I’ve had it on multiple units (two Mk1s and two Mk2s). Send it in for repair. It’s something to do with the film underneath the pads, if I recall. My current Mk1 (and my fifth AR in total) doesn’t do it. Yet.

Get it fixed. It’s worth it. It’s a great machine and worth putting up with its occasional quirky behavior.

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It’s an AMAZING machine and my personal favorite piece of gear at the moment. I noticed the buggy pad behaviour for a while already, but yesterday I wondered why I never did some research about it.

But to hear that it took you 5 (!) attempts to get it finally fixed seems quite discouraging tbh. Not sure if I’m willing to accept beeing without my AR for 2 months (I guess that’s at least the time it will take to get it back) and then still not beeing safe of recurrence of the problem. I’m not doing any live shows, so maybe I can live with it for studio work…

Elektron support is fantastic.
I had some really funky A4 issues with one unit. Every time I sent it in it would be around a 3 week round trip. sometimes less.
Sometimes you get unlucky with hardware and come across a bunch of bad ones in a row. It happens. In this case, I wouldn’t let it get you down about the RYTM MKI. It’s freaking solid for most people.

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Let me be clear - it didn’t take five attempts to get it fixed. I simply have owned five units overall. Only four of them had the issue, and one only temporarily and very briefly. Only one of them wasn’t fixed, and that was because Elektron replaced it. All the others were either repaired or worked fine on their own. Rest assured the unit is so good, I hate being without it.

Also, Elektron support is among the very best I have ever seen in my 40 years of electronic music.

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Exactly. I know many users that have never seen this issue. I have had remarkably bad luck.

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to OP: but you are sure, you have no midi feedback loop or something, right?

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@JuanSOLO @Scot_Solida thanks for these encouraging words! I’ll write a support ticket today!

@nionmu I was guessing about this too! Checked all my midi settings but couldn’t find any possible problems. OT1 is Midi master in my setting, sending clock to AR1 and A4 2 via a Midi splitter. AR and A4 are set to receive clock. Tbh, I don’t even know how I would send mute commands to the AR via Midi. Any ideas about that? Is there something else I should check?
Plus the pad behaviour seems quite similar to the problems @Scot_Solida talked about…

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If you have ANY midi tracks set to a midi channel, and the AR is receiving that channel and you just so happen to have a CC mapped to mutes. Maybe an LFO is making it happen.
Definitely trouble shoot right quick by disconnecting all things midi to the AR.
If it’s still doing it, make a ticket and send it in.

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I’ll check dat…

I had this same problem a couple years ago, unfortunately my warranty had already ended. So I took off the faceplate and vacuumed around the pads finding some bits of cat hairs inside the machine. Not sure if it was a hair causing the problem but once I put it back together there haven’t been any issues since.

You could even try vacuuming from the top without taking off the faceplate and see if that helps!

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Mine (2nd hand Mk2) did it the second day I had it, very occasionally and only on one specific pair of pads. Since then, I haven’t seen it happen again. So it does seem possible that it just goes away or fixes itself - maybe through self-calibration or something else. It wasn’t on the most up to date software, I updated it not long after and that may have helped (either through a bug fix or calibration).

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@elektrohansen:
yes, try this… :slightly_smiling_face:

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I had the same experience with a Tempest. Took it apart, back together, worked like a charm.