As you may know, I made a post last month about wanting to hire a designer to help me work on new features for Strum Machine. Well, I’m delighted to be able to introduce you to the guy I ended up hiring and show you some of what we’ve done in our first two weeks of working together!
It’s all in this little five-minute video (the last minute of which is actually just music):
Links: TylerStegall.com and his band The High Water Line.
New band settings menu at beta.strummachine.com.
If you decide to record your screen and mic as shown in the video, take note:
- The recorder only works on desktop/laptop computers.
- You can select the browser or tab that Strum Machine is in so nothing else on your computer gets recorded.
- Your camera is not recorded, and your submission will not be shared or used outside of Strum Machine.
- I’d be curious to hear how it works for you!
Thanks everyone. Can’t wait to show you what’s coming next. (It’s not just what’s in the teaser at the end of the video, either!)
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Thank you for the wonderful introduction Luke!
I’m so excited to be working on Strum Machine not only as a designer, but as a musician and long time user of the product. I hope that you’ll try out the new band settings experience, and for those of you who are willing to provide us feedback we can’t thank you enough. Your input goes a long way towards improving Strum Machine for everyone.
You’ll see me around the Strum Machine forum more often, and please, always feel free to ask me any questions for give any feedback that you might have.
Thanks!
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Nice! You know, yours is the first app I ever used or installed where the ‘maker’ or now makers 
take so much effort to listen to and feed back to the userbase, making this app even more special!!! Great that you found someone, have fun, Tyler!
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So now we’ve two magicians! And one of them is a banjo player! Cannot wait what you guys come up with!
Welcome, Tyler.
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Awesome! Love your product. I tell all my picking friends about it. I can’t wait to see what you have in store for us.
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I like the new colors. It makes everything stand out bette, especially for me personally. I’m an old buzzard with poor eye sight. And most of the time when I’m playing I’m not wearing glasses. The current design uses lots of pale colors that sometimes make it hard for me to make out what I’m looking at. This is especially so when I’m playing and my device is set back away from me. In contrast, this new design is very clean and clear. I like it a lot. Cudos to Tyler Stegall for the contribution.
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Great to hear that! I’m really happy with how it turned out, and am excited to slowly update the design of the rest of the product accordingly over time.
I have experience with a handful of products where this is the case (pretty much always made by solo founders or very small teams) but it definitely feels rare. I guess I understand, because it took me a surprisingly long time to realize how much I could lean into connecting with my community of users… but it has been SO beneficial to the product, and rewarding for me on a personal level, that I couldn’t imagine doing it any other way!
Two banjo players, actually! 
Our off-topic chat room/channel in Slack is mostly banjo-related talk and YouTube video links. It’s pretty great. 
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I’ve been a SM subscriber now for 5 years. There’s no doubt how it has helped to improve my fiddling but watching how it has improved so much over the years has been an added fringe benefit. It’s easy to see Luke is working hard to make SM the BEST accompanying app around. Ask a question and you get a prompt reply, often on the same day. Ask for an improvement and he usually does it - along with 3 others to make SM even better. Man o man, I sure heard that walkin base line in the teaser vid and can hardly wait! Rock (or maybe I should better say Old Time ) on Luke.
Rich Jakowski
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