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.

Sept 24 Update - We are working to greatly expand our production, but also maintain the quality we expect. It’s taking longer than expected but we expect to have a lot more production capacity operational in a few more weeks. Most of the part shortages are now resolved and we have a good inventory of parts.

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