I’ve recently been really getting into the Elektron Octatrack sampler/looper.  My band partner Jeff of Multicast came down the other night and we had a very productive session.  But, I spilled a little bit of cider on the top of it and some got down into the unit before I could completely dry it off.

I turned it off for a while and a later when turning it back on most things worked, except for one pot and the crossfader.  Bummer.  Too much clutter in the studio and lack of discipline!  I took the unit apart tonight with the goal of cleaning everything with q-tips and isopropyl alcohol and hoping for the best.

Taking the Octatrack apart is pretty simple.  Some 2mm hex screws on the outside, and the User Interface PCB is a Torx 10.  I wanted to take it completely apart so i could ensure that I got everything that seeped into the unit clean.

Upon taking it apart, I could see where the bottom CPU board needed a little cleaning and so did the bottom of the metal case enclosure.  Nothing too bad, which was great to see.

The main user interface PCB looked pretty good too.  I cleaned around the pots and otherwise there really was no staining or remnants of the mishap.  Since Pot B wasn’t working, I cleaned all around that area including the pot itself.

The cross fader was interesting, much more mechanical than I would have guessed.  A nice design to take a beating without breaking.  You can see the PCB pulled from the rest of the assembly.  The digital design would slide between the two “tents” on the PCB and IR light would reflect and get caught by the sensors.  Everything was done by light, neat.  This assembly needed some cleaning as the metal shafts were a bit sticky. The cross fader is an Infinium 45mm Crossfader DX400211.

Taking apart the cross fader (my warranty period expired a couple of years back) I noticed something making a sound, like a really small loose screw.  I popped off these plastic covers showing the IR LED and light sensors and noticed that PT8 has a small piece of glass (?) that fell off.  This is super small and i won’t be able to fix it.

If you note in the above picture, there are 7 holes which allow the IR LED (bottom center) to reflect off of the “tents” and be ready by the sensors underneath.  I presume that the reason for the plastic piece is to control the exact amount of light that each sensor can receive.  I noted that a couple of these were covered by the cider, so I cleaned these up really nice.

Upon putting everything back together, the pot worked great, and the fader worked all but 5% of the extreme left in which it centers.  I’m going to try and get a replacement from Elektron, but in the mean time I’m going to tape something to stop the fader from going all the way to the left, and that should be a work-around to the issue.

Upon putting everything back together, all functions except for the extreme left on the fader are working flawlessly now.  I put in an email to Elektron asking for the replacement cross-fader part.  If it is cheap, i’ll buy two and have a spare.  Happy that not much damage occurred to the unit; I could probably play using it without any change now; but I do want to fix the cross-fader if I can; meanwhile I’ll use the work-around.