First thing you want to establish is whether or not your DT was built within the last 3 years, because if it was the warranty will cover it against defects and it’s good to know this before you make any other moves. The sticker on the bottom has a manufacture date showing the year and the week it was produced, so after you establish whether or not you’re inside of warranty, you can then decide if you want to start a repair ticket on elektron.se through your user account, or if you want to open the digitakt up and take a look.
Some general advice about opening your Digitakt
Sometimes a button will be unresponsive because of an excess of lint or other dust build up that gets inside and blocks the contact surface, if you have pets or seem to think you may have other dust etc in the air where you practice and store your gear (a lot of people do) this is not too uncommon. If you are out of warranty, or aren’t patient enough to wait for a full service on your digitakt, you could pull off the encoder caps and use a hex key to remove the faceplate, then unhook the ribbon cable. To unhook the ribbon cable from the top, you’ll need some kind of tweezers, to do it from the bottom where it connects to the lower board you can do it carefully with your fingers.
Then using the next size up hex key, you remove the upper pcb from the faceplate. Look for any screws that look like these ones circled in blue, there are 9 of them, and after they’re all out the faceplate and the PCB will come apart.
At that point, you can take a look and if you see any lint or an excess of dust on the control board, you can get an idea of whether or not the buttons may have something blocking the contact. Around here, I like to put something over the OLED screen so that I don’t get dust on it and then have to clean it off later.
Next, I’d pop off the button caps of the offending buttons using slight leverage from the side of the button, the sides release easier than the top or bottom, and use compressed air to thoroughly purge anything that might have been in the buttons under the caps. Now is also a good time to clear anything else you see off of the pcb while you’re at it.
This may or may not help, and with multiple buttons malfunctioning you may just want to have elektron service your device anyways.
If you decide you don’t want to personally mess with it, they will arrange a service at cost even if it’s outside of warranty, so that’s always an option. It’s possible something which is upstream and connects all those buttons together has gone bad, they’ll be able to determine that and repair it. Don’t know if this will ultimately help, but you do have options and if you’re close to the 3 year date then taking care of it sooner would be better.
