- Published: 13 March 2020 13 March 2020
Hello, Effects Fans!
Chances are good that you are doing what we are doing – replanning your work and social life while the world deals with a new health concern. You can get better info about all of that elsewhere, so I’m not going to rehash it here to provide information that will be outdated by the time I get it posted. “Be cautious, but not fearful” is my approach, mixing in a good deal of “be flexible” and “be mindful of others” as we adjust. I imagine many of you have adopted similar approaches. While I expect we are all sharing similar constraints and inconveniences, those changes can impact us in different ways. Hopefully normalcy will return quickly, leaving us all a little wiser and a bit more thoughtful as a result.
At GT, some of our activities have been affected and some not so much. And not all the impacts are bad.
First, we also just announced that the 2020 Dallas International Guitar Festival we plan to attend has been postponed. The Nashville Amigo Guitar Show was also cancelled, although we had schedule conflicts for that show and probably weren’t going to be able to attend. The Nashville show is being replaced by a show in Arlington, TX this summer. We’re evaluating whether we can attend that show. We’ll have to wait and see as other scheduling challenges get resolved.
There’s also a bit of “slow down” in the business community as more employers reduce hours and/or ask their employees to work from home. In an industry where physical parts, equipment, and supplies need to get from Point A to Point B, things don’t move too quickly if there are no people there to move them. We expect those challenges to continue for a while.
Previously I had explained that we were going to be slowing R&D activities for a while to do some work on our website and some related activities. That work has been progressing nicely and the first stage of it is nearly complete. Much remains to be done, but we have a “breather” in those activities planned for the next couple of months or so. Those activities included some third-party support. Since most of that is online work, it is probably less subject to disruption since everyone involved can do most of this work from home or alternate locations across the Internet. If that unplanned disruption with the online work doesn’t occur, then our planned disruption to R&D may start again in a couple of months when we resume our website work.
With postponements and general slowing, along with the planned break in our website work, we find we actually have more time than expected for R&D activities. We have one more module that is completed and should be announced very soon. We also have our first boards back for another 4 modules. We are in the process of building and testing those, which if all goes as planned should give us more modules to announce in April and May when we were expecting to not have any new product announcements. We also have another very large batch of modules with designs that are complete, or very nearly so, and we’ll be getting boards for those soon. I’ve lost track at the moment, but there are about 20 of them, which will “Compare To” around 30-50 well-known pedals. Again, if all goes as planned, we could begin releasing those around the beginning of summer.
Or something else may happen to disrupt all of our disrupted plans! Whatever it is, you can be sure that we’ll still be here adjusting our work of designing and building the largest offering of the best rack effects available in our solar system!
Cheers!
Bill Gerlt
President, Gerlt Technologies
Dallas, Texas