New=Nova
Yes kiddos, time for your daily Latin lesson. Well, not really.
I had one of these ages ago. Used the hell out of it, but for whatever reason (probably to acquire the Next Greatest Thing) I ended up selling it, and it eventually became a synth I wished I hadn't parted with. About two or three years ago, I found a Nova II keyboard on the auction here for not that much and bid and won, so I was happy to have that. Having almost one knob/slider per function was the shit, as the Nova series are realllllly deeeeeeeeeeep machines, seriously, programmer's heaven. Again, for whatever reason (Next Greatest Thing totally) I sold it. Virus TI maybe? I dunno. Immediately missed it. So when I saw this for $350, I was like fuck... I don't have the inputs on the mixer!!! I can't really spend much more than that and I will DEFINITELY get outbid aaaargh! So I crossed my appendages and bid $366 and won it for $360. Whew! But the seller was a liar. "No encoder or button issues." BULLSHIT. Both the Fast Data encoders (to the right of the screen) were jumpy as hell. Grrrrrr. Also, the page up button didn't work 3/4 of the time. GRRRRRRR. Not. Cool. So I got in touch with Novation support and they are literally the fucking best, THE BEST I TELL YOU, and have two new encoders on the way, free of charge. They hook people up. So stoked, and this is not the first time I've had this experience with Novation. The aforementioned Nova II (I'm sure I posted about it here) had a broke off slider and the encoders were iffy, and I got replacement parts for that. Also had a K-Station with a wonky encoder, got that part. And more. Novation rules. I told the guy I've been hooked up so many times in the past I'd like to repay the favor and send them a case of craft beer. And I bloody damn well will too if I can get their mailing address! Anyway, I had a minute before dinner tonight, so I took the thing apart, disassembled the encoders, cleaned and lubed them, snapped the tops back in, and put it all back together. Works freaking fine now. Oh and about the button. I thought there may be a tact switch deal, but Novation designed the buttons in a very unique way, shoulda taken photos... almost like keyboard velocity sensing rubber and conductive contact meets open-faced electrical conductive point deal. Cleaned it off with and eraser and now that works perfect too. Yay! All is well in Novaland. Thing sounds so good too.
You can see how you can gently pry the tabs open that hold the top half of the encoder in place, then do the cleaning, and maybe gently give the little sensor leggiwegs a pushing upward, then fit the top half back on and squeeze down the tabs from the side and top (takes finesse with a pair of super pointy needle nose pliers). Not impossible. And until the replacement parts arrive will do just fine. I did make one mistake with this job though. There was a brass machine screw female thingy that serves two purposes: One, to hold down the PCB; Two, to give the hold-the-housing-down screw a place to actually screw into. On the one side, it screws down over a male machine screw piece that sticks out from the inside, on the rear of the front panel (backside of the front panel?) and then on the other is where the holdy-downy screw goes in. I thought it was sticking up a bit and I gave it a tweak with pliers and the whole thing snapped off. Oops. I have some JB Weld (JD Weld? I forget), it's epoxy strengthened with powdered steel, so I may try to epoxy the broke off side back but I have doubts as to how structurally sound that will be. We do learn from our mistakes.
Shameless plug for my own musical misadventures. Check it out. CD release via Diffuse Reality Records. Coming March 10th. Woo-hoo.!
That's all for this one. Hope y'all are ok out there.
