Update on order shipments, new Fret Fix, Strum Fix 3 strum bar changes
/Shipping Schedule Change
For the past few years we’ve been working on a schedule where we did shipping twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. With the additional workload of printing and building the Strum Fix Plus 3 and the Fret Fix, trying to ship two times a week has been a struggle and has meant that I’m working 7 days/week (I have 2 other jobs in addition to Byte Arts).
So I’ve made the decision to move to doing all shipping once a week on Tuesdays. While I don’t like to make people wait longer to get their orders, by going to a weekly schedule I’ll have time to build things in larger, more-efficient batches. I was getting burned out and the quality of my work was suffering, so I think this not only help my mental health, but help the products as well.
New Fret Fix PCBs
If you’ve placed an order for a Fret Fix recently then you probably are aware that they’ve been out-of-stock for a couple weeks as I worked on the new version and waited for the new PCBs to be made. The new PCBs have now arrived — I’ll be building and testing them over the next few days and then will start shipping orders early next week.
The new version has connections for wiring into a Precision Bass as well as a few other guitar types — I’ll post more details in the coming days.
Strum Fix Plus 3 Strum Bar Changes
New, lighter, snappier strum bar
Based on feedback I’ve received over the past few weeks I’ve decided to make a change to the geometry of the strum bar to make it lighter and less prone to “overstrums”. An “overstrum” can occur when you press the bar up to “play” a note and then totally let go of the bar and let it swing back down to center — sometimes the momentum of the strum bar will cause it to swing past center and activate the down strum switch very briefly. By making the strum bar a little thinner and not quite as tall it makes the strum bar lighter, so it has less momentum and is much less likely to overstrum. The lighter bar feels a little “snappier” and returns to center better too, so it’s a win-win! As always, if anyone has any special preferences I’m happy to accommodate.
As always, thank you for your support!
-Scott P
