The engineers at Fret Zealot have a long term goal of teaching people to play the guitar. They say that ninety percent of people who start to play the guitar give up, and most of the frustration and lack of persistence comes from a lack of good learning tools. We’ve previously covered their first Fret Zeppelin system of learning to play guitar and the group is back with a brand new name and a crowdfunding campaign centered around the bass guitar.
The bass guitar experience keeps most of the six string system intact while making some tweaks and product improvements. Continuing is the system of thin LED strips that attach on the top side of every fret and light up to show the user finger placement. Fret Zealot is designed to fit any full-sized four string bass guitar and doesn’t discriminate between Fender, Gibson and Ibanez. The app now includes a few more programming tricks, including the ‘A/I Listening Mode’ that will wait for the user to play the correct note before lighting up the next note. There’s also a greater library of video lessons set up over the last year to give different perspectives on user demonstrations.
Shaun Masavage answered some questions about the manufacturing process and issues they found during the first production run. He said that many of their issues arose because the group was making a completely new product overseas. One supplier sold an ‘equivalent tape’ that was specified to meet the design requirements for adhesive but was actually fake 3M tape. A glue distributor held a shipment hostage until the Fret team agreed to purchase 300 kilograms of glue – Masavage says “we have years worth of glue for coating now as well as a new supplier.”
LEDs proved to be an issue on a few occasions. The ninety LEDs that make up the Fret Zealot matrix contain a rainbow of colors but when receiving different LEDs from the same batch of parts different colors might be shown even with the same input voltage. One shipment of LEDs was stopped in customs because the FDA said that LEDs can blind people and required a unit for testing purposes before clearing the shipment. These and other manufacturing issues were all corrected and systems were implemented and every person at every level of production is now trained to help improve quality and efficiency.
Fret Zealot continues to be a great learning tool born out of frustration with current products that were available. Musicians are a passionate group and I’ve seen again and again that a hobby that inspires passionate users often inspires great engineering solutions to those users’ problems. Fret Zealot’s campaign ends on May 31 and if successful first units are scheduled to ship in August 2018.