July Update

I hope you all are having a good summer and are staying cool. Here in Montana summer has arrived and I’ve finally been able to put away the snow shovels :-)

Limited Availability of Some Products

I’ve gotten a lot of messages asking about when more sold out products will be available — we are continually making more but they often sell out quickly making it look like something has been sold out for weeks. The root cause is a delay in getting some parts coupled with unexpected increase in demand. We’re working to build larger batches and keep more parts in inventory so I expect that we’ll have full stock of all products in early August, but supplies may be limited until then. Luckily none of our costs have increased so I don’t see the need to change any prices.

July 23 Update - looks like the CrowdStrike IT issue affected some of our suppliers and so some shipments may be delayed this week.

Byte Arts Guitar Project

Progress on the guitar has been stalled a bit lately as we deal with the inventory issues, but it is still being worked on — the main remaining task is finalizing the PCB layouts. We’ve also been evaluating some interesting new strummer designs for the guitar and hope to have a few different options available when the guitar is released — the modular design means it will be easy to swap out different versions, and the open source design means anyone is free to make their own.

[Sept 19 Update - we now have a new page dedicated to the guitar project!

Future of Rock Band (and similar games)

Like many of you I still wish for a new version of Rock Band but I’m not holding my breath. In my opinion Rock Band 3 is still the definitive version with its support for keyboards in addition to vocals, drums, and guitars and I’m keeping my PS3 hooked up just for that (and Beatles Rock Band).

I think the future of our musical game hobby lies with open source games like Clone Hero, which unfortunately is not available on a console, but is available for PCs and Macs.

I’ve tried Fortnite Festival (they got me when they added Billie Eilish) and while it’s fun, I didn’t like having to install the whole huge Fortnite package just to play a couple songs.

Anyhow, if you haven’t tried Clone Hero (or one of the other alternatives) it’s worth doing — don’t forgot to thank the volunteers who’ve devoted so much effort to continue making it better.

Best Regards,
Scott