In bygone days of yore I wrote a rather angry post about my Edirol PCR-30 midi controller, whose key contacts failed after essentially zero use. In my post I mentioned e-mailing Roland support about the issue but I got no response, so I just let it drop. After all, the thing was out of warrantee and I had other stuff to deal with.

Last week I randomly decided to google around and see if anybody else had found a solution to the problem. Well, the results of the search were pretty interesting. The problem was ubiquitous — tons of folks with PCR controllers built around the same time as mine reported it on forums and review sites. (This was not the case when I first discovered the problem, by the way.) Some people reported that opening the keyboard and rubbing the key contacts with a stiff pencil eraser brought them back to life, which got me thinking. These things are just electrical contacts, right? Why not put conductive paint on the contacts? That should get them working again for good!

So I did a goog for “conductive paint” and one of the first links that came up was this one. And hey, can you believe it? They sell a “Rubber Keypad Repair Kit”! (MG Chemicals, cat. #8339.) Hallelujah, exactly what I wanted! It’s actually designed for repairing remote controls, but midi controllers work on the same principle. I decided to order one and gave it a shot. (BTW, my experience with Action Electronics was very good.)

How did it turn out? Well, it was good but not great. The kit did, in fact, manage to revive almost all of my keys. Why didn’t it work for all of them? Well, each key actually has two contacts underneath, and a bit of experimentation revealed that the time interval between closing the two contacts is quite important for the keyboard performance. (I assume this is how they sense the velocity with which you struck the key.) If they close in the wrong order, for example, no note is triggered. I think that the added thickness of the paint (which didn’t always go on particularly smoothly) caused timing problems with some of the keys, perhaps even causing the contacts to close in the wrong order. I tried sanding off the paint and repainting the bad keys, but it never quite worked for all the keys.

I tried to live with this for a while — it was, after all, a big improvement over the keyboard’s previous condition. But the fact is, there are times in any musician’s life when only D# will do, and using D or E as a workaround just doesn’t cut it. Finally, I decided that it couldn’t hurt to call Roland and try talking to a live person. After some bouncing around in their phone system (boy do they have awful muzak when you’re on hold!) they actually gave me approval to send in my keyboard! This despite it being many years out of warrantee and my admission that I’d tried to fix the problem myself!

I was a little bit afraid that their technician would investigate the problem, find the contacts covered with conductive paint, and stamp DENIED on my RMA ticket with an evil laugh, but no such thing happened. I suspect they just swapped out the whole keyboard assembly without ever uncovering my handiwork — why bother removing all the keys when this is a known defect? So after 3 days I had my PCR-30 back in fully working condition for no cost other than the time and gas required to drop the thing off at the nearby Roland factory and pick it up again. Kudos to Roland for making good after all these years!

So anyhow, the moral of the story is that talking to people by phone works better than e-mail, at least if those people are Roland employees. Or maybe it’s that conductive paint doesn’t work as well as you might hope.