Hey y’all! New to the community and found my way to kinotone after a bunch of research. These pedals look so amazing! I would love to get my hands on one, but it looks like I was a few weeks late to the presale of the next batch.
Since I’m new, I was curious if anyone could give me some insight to how Jaak does his production releases. Was the preorder that just passed my only Opportunity to pick up a ribbon for the next year? Or will there be another drop in a few months?
If someone were to return their ribbon, is there a waiting list to grab a demoed one? I’d prefer to stay away from sites like reverb, but if id have to wait a year that might be my only option.
Also, am I able to get my hands on the manual to read up on it to tease my fantasy of owning one, and preparing me for when I finally grab one?
I appreciate anyone’s insight and look forward to being a part of this community! Cheers!
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Hi there! Welcome! Thanks for posting.
We have not had the most traditional production schedule, so this is probably a good opportunity to explain how things have worked historically and what direction we are heading in.
To-date there have been 3 production runs of Ribbons and 1 of Sparks:
- Ribbons Fall 2022 (~200 units)
- Ribbons Spring 2023 (~500 units)
- Sparks Spring 2024 (~350 units)
- Ribbons Fall 2024 (~500 units)
The initial batch of Ribbons was available for immediate shipment and sold in small drops over the course of about 3 months. Every batch after that has been a pre-order with a lead time of 8-12 weeks. We’ve usually held back small amounts of pre-order stock and / or B stock for impromptu sales later on. These are always announced on the forum first.
We’ve relied on a pre-order model for some time partially due to supply chain issues and partially due to the advanced and ambitious nature of the things I’ve created. They require large sums of cash up front and people’s orders directly fund the production.
We hope to transition out of a pre-order model for 2025 and would like to move back to doing more consistent drops of small batches.
If you have a forum account, you’ll always be the first to know about new batches, new releases, etc. We have an “Announcements” category and when we post there it triggers an email to all users.
We’d like to sell off our remaining Ribbons and Sparks inventory before the end of the year. We also have some B stock to let go of. No concrete dates yet but aiming for late November / early December. Keep an eye on the forum if you’re interested - this will be the first time we’ve had stock available for immediate shipment in a long time so I suspect they might go fast.
We don’t have a waiting list. We don’t get many returns and if we do we re-test them and sell them at a discount during a B stock sale.
All of our documentation is on our website. For Ribbons, click on the “User Manual” tab here. For Sparks, click on the “User Manual” tab here. The PDF manuals are the same as the printed manuals that ship with the pedal. The online manuals have all of the same info but also cover advanced topics (MIDI, CV and more).
Hope this is helpful and answers your questions!
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