Thursday, May 7, 2009

New things at GGG

We have just released a new Digital Reverb Kit. The kit was brought about by the work of my friend Alfonso Hermida. This is an absolutely fabulous sounding reverb and we will have some demo samples soon. The release of the kit marks the beginning of a some new things happening at General Guitar Gadgets. I'm somewhat overdue letting you know about what's up for the future at GGG. This post has some updates and thoughts about our future projects and offerings.

Our policy since the site's inception, over 10 years ago, was to offer free stuff to DIY stompbox builders. Since we began selling PCBs and kits a few years ago, we have kept the free information for builders to be able to do any project that we offer for sale. This policy is one of several distiguishing features that takes GGG a cut above our competitors. We will continue this policy and always supply lots and lots of free information. There may be a few minor exceptions to the PCB masks in the future, not to increase our sales, but only to offer better products.

How many of you have realized that the professionally made PCBs we offer are designed so that they can be etched at home by DIYers? We have kept that in mind as a design factor on all of our PCB layouts. There may be PCBs coming in the future with new projects that are not etchable at home, not because of copyright issues or as a ploy to increase PCB sales, but due to the fact that we can offer PCBs in a smaller or better format if we can disregard issues related to etching your own. I've struggled with this several times already while designing some of the PCBs. Should I continue to keep it in an etchable format, or if I could just add some traces to the top layer or reduced the width of the traces I could get the PCB down to a smaller size and make it more versitile to use in smaller enclosures, etc.

Some of you may have noticed that many of the PCB that are etched in-house here at GGG are running out of stock. I'm announcing to the public at this time we will no longer be doing any in-house etching. We still have some of the etched PCBs in stock. We will be converting most of these PCBs to the better quality ones with solder mask, thru-hole plating and screen printed tops. As mentioned above, as much as possible we will keep these in an at-home-etchable format on the projects pages as they are converted. We are running behind on converting the PCBs, but everything that is "out of stock" will be restocked with the higher quality PCBs.

So, back to the new Digital Reverb Kit relating to some of the above discussions:
1 - This Digital Reverb kit will be the first kit we will offer that we do not have a PCB mask for builders to use to etch their own PCB. The PCB belongs to Hermida Engineering and we have access to it only as part of the reverb kits at this time.

2 - The Reverb kit will be the first time that we will not be selling the stand-alone PCB for it. It is only available as a kit at this time. Again, the PCB belongs to Hermida Engineering and it is for the kit builders at this time.

I hope none of you think these changes are bad. We will continue to be the best source on the internet for building stompboxes and hopfully be able to offer more really cool stuff. Please reply with comments if you feel the urge!

Happy stombox building!
JD Sleep