June update

Orders/Shipping Resume This Week

First of all I need to say thanks to everyone for their patience the past few weeks as we took a little break from taking orders and shipping products. As a small family-owned business it’s sometimes hard to keep up with both business and family obligations and so rather than try to spread ourselves too thin I decided to temporarily pause orders and shipping for a few weeks.

That pause is coming to an end and we’ll start taking orders later this week. We’ll also ship orders more often rather than just once a week as we work to get caught up.

Quantities of some items may still be limited as we deal with a supply chain issue that has delayed some parts — I had thought the supply chain issues were behind us, but apparently I was wrong :-(

Update on New Guitar

I know a lot of you are anxious to hear more about the guitar we are working on, and I plan to share some more details later this week. We are still refining the design and testing some new concepts for the strummer. Since we no longer have to worry about making a strummer that can fit within the confines of the existing Rock Band guitars we are free to try out some new ideas, but we still have to build and test them since it all comes down to how it feels when playing.

One detail I can share is that the strummer will use mechanical keyboard switches which will be easy replaceable without any soldering required. Almost any “Cherry MX-compatible” switch should work, so you can make the strummer as clicky or as quiet as you want.

Originally I’d planned to have the guitar design done this month, and we may still meet that deadline but we’ve decided to take whatever time is needed to do it right so the design phase may stretch into July. My hope is that this guitar is something that will hold up to years of use so we do need to do some extensive testing to insure that all the parts will last.

Other Stuff

As I write this I’m still out of town dealing with some family business, mostly dealing with some of the aftermath after my father passed last year. It’s not fun, but like much of life it’s something we’ll all have to deal with at some point and I just want to encourage anyone in a similar situation to remember to ask for help and don’t be too hard on yourself. We are all in this together!

I’m really looking forward to getting back to Montana, especially now that it seems like Summer is actually coming and we are (hopefully) done with the snow (for a little while at least).
[June 17 Update - I spoke too soon and it’s supposed to snow again, argh!!!]

Take care everyone!

-Scott