Buttons

Nearly from day one that I owned my Roland Fantom X8, I've had trouble with the buttons.

I takes me a while to realize certain things, and this is an example.  Sit back for a short story:

When the first button went bad on my board, it was a button that was mounted on a small circuit board that was easy to replace -- and a mere $62.00.  Another two buttons on another circuit board failed.  I replaced that board for $160.00.  Yet another button failed on yet another circuit board and I replaced that for $140.00.  Then another button failed on the first circuit board -- the one that I had just replaced several months earlier.

So it finally dawned on me the other day that I might be able to just replace the buttons instead of the whole circuit boards.  I did a little online research and found that not only is this "button problem" a known problem, but most owners do just replace the buttons themselves.

So, with a soldering station set up, I went to work and replaced bad buttons with good ones.  A continuity test with a multi-meter confirms whether a button is working correctly or not.

Bang, bang, bang and I have a good-as-new circuit board with all the buttons working!

So now I hope to do this same thing with some other bad buttons I have on other circuit boards.  With all of the buttons replaced, I'll finally be able to get into actual sound synthesis.

Here's a picture of some of the bad buttons.  They're about 6mm wide.

Figure 1: Bad Buttons