We’re getting there!

After the panic, scrambling and delaying plans that dominated 2021, it looks like this year is going to see a lot of the developments and expansion (as well as new releases) finally reach fruition.

We’re eyeing summer as being a nice turning point. By then we’re hoping to have a bunch of loose ends tied up and be able to start on some exciting things we’ve been hoping to do for a while.

Of course, the world is in a hell of a state, so things can potentially change at any point, so please picture words ‘fingers crossed’ after every sentence here.

We’ve now officially ditched the preorder model. We’ve caught up on builds and everything in the future will be built and ready to ship before the listings go up.

We’re also aiming to be producing bigger batches to give people a better shot of being able to order a pedal.

We’ll most likely be listing pedals at noon (EST) on Fridays, as we always have done, and start shipping orders the following Monday.

Here’s a rundown of the next couple of batches.

The first thing on the cards is ‘out with the old’, so…

Friday March 11th – Canny Fettle Boosts

We’ll be listing the very last Canny Fettle Boosts before we officially discontinue them.

Friday March 25th – Hand Samwitches

After that we’ll finally be getting round to that small run of Hand Samwitches we forgot about for 4 years. If you’re not familiar with the Hand Samwitch please check out this old video from the original run.

We will have a couple of original hand painted ones and about 20 screen printed ones.

Once those are gone and we’ve finished up a bit more stock check, we’re back to working on the usual stuff and making batches larger and to a more regular schedule.

Friday April 1st (or possibly 8th) – Kilters

The next batch in the queue will be Kilters, including a new colourway!

I’m hoping to have them all built and ready to go by the Friday 1st, but it might be the Friday after depending on how things progress in the meantime.

At the end of April, I’m planning on heading back home to the UK for the first time since I came to America in 2016. I’m going to try and squeeze in a few Woozy and Skitter builds before I leave, but that might be a little ambitious. I can’t promise when they will be available yet, but Woozies and Skitters are well overdue, so they’ll be next in line.

After that will be Swan Hunters, most likely in June.

What else is coming?

We currently have a few new pedals in various stages of development. Earlier this year I ordered prototype PCBs for three designs. Unfortunately I messed one up fairly badly, I might be able to salvage it, but we’ll have to see…

Anyway, right now we have a dirt pedal and a modulation pedal that (I really hope) I didn’t also mess up. Once the Canny Fettle Boosts are finished, I’ll be getting those prototypes in enclosures to see what’s what.

The provisional names for these three prototypes are

The Dunsh – dirt

The Thrummer – modulation

The Skitzy – modulation/ reverb

I don’t want to say too much about these yet, because I don’t want to jinx anything, but the Dunsh, if it lives up to expectations will likely become a regular dirt pedal. It’s got DNA from the Bloody Gett (via the Canny Fettle Boost), but is most certainly its own thing.

The Thrummer definitely has some Kilter DNA

The Skitzy has some Woozy DNA

I can’t make any promises yet about which of these might be coming this year, and which will have to wait until next year, because it really depends on what comes together the quickest.

The Swan Hunter manual is well overdue and we’re hoping to have an rather comprehensive online version by summer, hopefully a few videos too!

What else is further down the line?

Our plans reach deep.

In terms of pedals, here’s two more names that are in the running for a release this year.

Shields Ferry – utility

The Dunce – Our #endofdaysfuzz

Five new pedals in one year is almost certainly too much though, so we’ll be playing it by ear.

One longer term goal is to work further on the current PCBs to help speed up production. I’m hoping to be able to switch over to the very common 9mm pots instead of the 16mm pots that we currently use.

I also want to delve into the power sections of our modulation pedals to see if we can work around the issues that Strymon power supplies have been giving our LFOs.

There will be an article about this shortly, but the summary is that Strymon power supplies deliver power in such a way that causes about 50% of our LFOs (and other digital chips) to latch up. Which has meant that we have had to introduce more testing that takes up time and has left us with a huge pile of LFOs that are fine with any other power supply but might not start up in the eventuality that the user has a Strymon supply. It’s something that unfortunately we have to now design around or carry on working round. Anyway, later in the year I’ll be experimenting and hopefully we’ll have a cost efficient solution, that saves us a bit of time and creates less waste.

In other news, in the second half of the year, we’re hoping to be ready to start producing some content. It will most definitely feature a bunch of friends and colleagues, and we’re very excited about it. I don’t want to divulge too much, but it’s definitely real.

As ever, we’d love to hear from you with any suggestions or feedback.

Cheers,

Woolly