Hi all,
Sorry if we've been a bit slow on responding to messages and comments lately. We've been exhausting all the productivity here on inventory management and shipping.
So far, we've shipped around 300 packages. It seems like some of you have already received your packages. We are working at a rate of around 100 packages a day, since we have to do some quality control check on each unit, and UPS pickup can only handle so many boxes a day. We should have all of the US backer units shipped out within this week, both Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Some of you should already have tracking numbers available on Backerkit, and most of you should have a tracking number sent to you by UPS upon pick-up (we forgot to enter some of your email addresses when we created the shipping labels, so some of you might not be getting any, but they are on the way, we'll upload all tracking numbers to backerkit/indiegogo after we finish all of the packages).
For those of you that got the package, you might notice there isn't an assembly manual in the package. That's because the assembly tutorial is in an interactive video form in our app. The app is still currently in beta, since we are still making changes on a daily basis. Developing a mobile DAW was a lot harder than we imagined at first, but we fully intend to finish all functionalities envisioned and give you a great product to play with. As of right now, the app is fully functional on sample loading, triggering, volume control, sequencer recording and playback, and basic sample edits like trimming and slicing. Over the next month, we'll be adding functionalities like note playing, quick effects, sequencer layering and more(these are all features that is already mostly developed, just not live on the build yet before we finish and test them thoroughly). We are also talking to a number of beat makers regarding changes/improvements to be done on the app workflow, so chances are a few months later this app will look very different than it does now. You can sign up for the beta invite at: https://www.rhythmo.io/get-started. After you sign up on the site, we'll send a testing invite to you within a day. Also, feel free to send us any feedback on the app workflow, and we'll see if it makes sense to implement changes.
If you don't want to follow the tutorial in app, we have the entire assembly tutorial in video and PDF form in the download link as well. We've had a few cases where a few parts are missing in the box. If you are seeing parts missing throughout your assembly process, send us an email on our website contact section, and we'll send you the corresponding replacement parts. Try to finish installing all that you can before you reach out to us though - some of the parts might be placed in other bags, and sending replacement parts can be pretty expensive on our already thin margins.
You should also have a code on the sheet for some free lessons on Melodics, courtesy of our friends over at... well, Melodics. Melodics is definitely one of the best ways to learn how to fingerdrum, impress everybody and get all the people that say "button pushing is not real music making" to shut up once and for all. Head over to https://melodics.com/ for downloading the software. Now, unfortunately there's another workaround involved in this process. Melodics has agreed to make a custom mapping for BeatBox, but they haven't started on it yet, since they got their BeatBox unit not too long ago and far as we understand, a large portion of their team is currently on vacation, so they can't implement this change until January. Melodics offers a tool for you to map your own controller. For Mac OS, this works without a problem. For Windows, for some reason Melodics doesn't detect midi inputs from the BeatBox in the hardware mapping screen, which wasn't the case with our older prototypes. In order to get this to work on Windows, you need to download the mapping file we created, at the bottom of our Get Started link: https://www.rhythmo.io/get-started, as well as the guide from Melodics on uploading your own mapping file. Save the .json file included here in your Melodics local data folder as the instruction states, and Melodics should be functional. I know this sounds very complicated, and here's a video instruction below, honestly the whole process shouldn't take you longer than 5 minutes:
With our promo code, you have access to some of my favorite lessons from Melodics. I highly recommend signing up for their full subscription for a month and really focus on practicing. A lot of you have seen my finger drumming performances on our social media pages. Prior to starting the company, I barely even dabbled in controller performance; but within 4 months of on-and-off training with Melodics, I was able to produce the contents you've seen on our social media. We'll make another video in the future regarding what we think is the proper way to train with Melodics.
We are working on shipping for the rest of the world right now. A slight issue at hand is that SANWA couldn't package the button upgrades - they could only send us all of the buttons individually, and our logistics partner isn't going to be able to bag the buttons either, so we have to find someone in China to bag all of the button upgrades. We'll try to get all the other units without the button upgrade to ship first this week. The challenge here is really because we are so understaffed, when we focus on one issue, in this case inspecting and packing all the units for US backers, we kind of just don't have time to do anything else. I'm very sorry about the frustration we have caused for all of our international backers, and thank you very much for your patience.