Spring and Summer 2015 has seen our development team busy with getting Jambé ready for our first production run. The first item we needed to sort out was what color of wood to make for the first run. Internally, the Jambé staff is evenly split between the light wood and the dark wood shells. We ran a poll with our Kickstarter buyers, and the results were also evenly split ! That didn’t make our job any easier, but instead of choosing only one color Jambé to produce, we’ve decided to make a split production run of both dark and light wood shells. A little more work, but we at least know our customer’s interest matches our own internal opinions.
Speaking of shells, we did a prototype run of some solid dark walnut shells, to see how they would look as a Jambé. Here is a picture:
Beautiful. But, as you can imagine, a solid walnut shell is not cheap! We’ll be offering the walnut shell Jambé for sale, but it will cost a bit more to cover the wood costs.
Sales
We hope to get our online sales site up and running by NAMM 2016. As you might imagine, finishing up a product seems to take the longest time. We want the first Jambé to be perfect, but we don’t want to delay it forever either. Getting a quality 1.0 verison out the door is our main goal. We won’t ship anything until we believe it’s right on the money.
Jambé is not built with plastic parts made overseas. Everything is made, assembled, and tested here, so we can make sure every piece is right and works perfectly together. It might mean delaying final shipments for a bit until things are right, but we can do that since we are making a quality instrument and not a toy.
Software
Oh boy, are people going to be surprised by our latest software. The Jambé videos you’ve seen online were made with our alpha build software, which functioned pretty well. During the last several months, our software team has stepped back and re-examined the software as a whole. They decided to re-write a large portion of the code from scratch, including a new and unique custom sound engine. All I can tell you at this time is “WOW”. The results are mighty impressive. Once we get a bit more polish on the code, we’ll be releasing some new videos with our resident musicians. You are sure to be impressed, so stay tuned for updates. And make sure you sign up for our newsletter to keep up to date on all our developments.
Thanks to everyone for your support of Jambé !!
