Update October 2020

Yesterday I finally finished the first video of the KNTRL9. This was a big milestone for me since I wanted to present the video myself and I had never done that before. I personally think it came out great!

Now that I have this out of the way, it’s time to take a step back and see where exactly I am with the development of the controller (plus I can finally take some time to write this post).

Where am I now?

So generally, lately I’ve been mainly busy with the video. Now that that’s done, there is still work left on the controller, I need to (finally) come up with the sales price and I have a crowdfunding campaign to prepare.

The product

I now have a working prototype that functions very well in Ableton and already looks like the final product (apart from some minor details). I’ve tested it
in Ableton and it seems to work fast and correct. I’ve removed all the bugs that I could find and it seems to work stable, given that you use it in Ableton.

Pricing

I know I’ve been promising this for a long time already but I really want to make sure the price is correct. I have all the offers from the manufacturers, including the lead times so I have calculated a price and estimated a shipping date.

The reason why I haven’t published the price yet, is because I’m trying to get it further down, without compromising on quality (quality is a very important factor for me). So, next week (week 41), I will do a final calculation and publish the price and estimated shipping date.

Crowdfunding

In order to finance this the production of the KNTRL9, I depend on financing (I’ve already spent almost all of my savings in this project).

I’ve decided to go for crowdfunding because I think it’s a good way to get people involved without the downsides of having a single investor. Most of the posts you have seen from me, are an effort to build up a following, so that when the crowdfunding campaign starts, it will give me a kickstart.

I already have about 250 people on the mailing list but this is not nearly enough. I’m still looking for ways to get the word out that this amazing MIDI controller is coming soon. You can of course help by sharing my posts and/or redirecting people to my website to sign up.

What is there still to do?

The product

The following things still need to be done:

• Create a tool to setup the controller templates
• Make some small changes to the rotary knobs
• Fix some minor errors in the PCB design
• Add MIDI templates functionality to the controller itself (plus make a new video about this)
• Polish the fader knobs
• Write a test tool for the controller
• Create a firmware upgrade tool so that I can post firmware updates on the controller)
• Test, test and test (we don’t want a buggy controller of course)!

Crowdfunding

I need to grow the mailing list to at least 1000 people. When that’s done, I want to create a smashing video about the controller to get everyones attention. 

Planning

It’s kinda hard to create a planning with the current corona crisis still working on the economy. Besides, I’m doing most of the work myself and that makes things sometimes hard to plan. I made a full planning for the project, the current planning is as follows:

Note that this is a very rough planning and things may change but this is leading for me to work on stuff.