Help! Organelle Servicing

Organelle
1

I’ve had my Organelle for nearly two years now, and love it to bits. It was a Christmas present from my wife and it continues to surprise and delight me.

Unfortunately, since I got it, a couple of keys have worked intermittently at best, which can be frustrating. Being in Australia, service options are limited, and the distributor I originally purchased it from has since closed down. So I decided to have a crack at fixing it myself, since I have a reasonable amount of experience fixing all sorts of keyboards and synths. Sending it back to the US can take months and is prohibitively expensive - and there was probably more chance of it going missing in the post than if I fixed it myself.

The keys are working much better, but I had a few questions to try and ascertain if I’m on the right track.

  1. Beneath each of the knobs is an oval cutout for the potentiometer lug. Can anyone else see these slightly when looking straight down? I’m not entirely sure they’re meant to be visible, but having them very slightly visible is the only way I can get good response from the keyboard across the range. Looking at some photos online, it looks like they might be, but it seems to me that they really should be covered by the knobs.

  2. Does anyone else find that if they run a finger along the aluminium panel whilst it’s turned on, without touching any other part of the chassis with another part of the body, that there’s a slight sense of vibration or tingling? I notice that there’s some insulating tape between the potentiometers and the chassis and I’m wondering if maybe this has worn. If it’s normal though, I won’t worry too much about it (lots of electronic devices with double-insulated power supplies exhibit this behaviour.

Love my Organelle, just want her to be okay :slight_smile: Any help or tips greatly appreciated.

2

  1. do you have washers in place, I think this is why you don’t see them… as indeed the knobs are slightly raised off the surface.
    if it bothers you, you could also change the knobs to slightly larger ones.

  2. its a grounding ‘issue’, (you’ll find posts on the forum about it), which can happen more with some PSUs and also if your not grounding it thru something else e.g. a mixer. its nothing to worry about, just a tiny current leak.
    I’m a bit surprised about the insulation tape, neither of mine have this.

id not worry about either “issue” :slight_smile:

3

If you are still having any trouble with the keys you should contact C&G via email. They have by all accounts been really good at dealing with this issue when customers came forward and I (located in the UK) can personally vouch that they sent replacement parts quickly.

#2 i’d say is a legit issue of ergonomics and in fact, practicality - as it also seems to cause interference with capacitive touch devices such a ipad’s where the screens skitz when connected to the organelle’s audio in.

4

Thank you both for the replies. I really appreciate it.

The keys seem to be working much better now that everything has been realigned, though it took a few attempts to get the keys nicely aligned at both ends of the keyboard, as well as the ports. I guess this is the disadvantage of a single board design.

Good to know that the tingling isn’t just my unit. I haven’t had it plugged into a mixer whilst I’ve been testing whereas usually I do, so I’ll see if that resolves it.

@Wannop, what parts did they send you when you were experiencing issues?