It’s been awhile (246 days) since my last Backstage Pass newsletter. That one was related to iOS audio issues, which I ended up wrestling with for months, making for an exhausting fall of 2025. 😮‍💨

After recovering from that ordeal, I shipped some small improvements (list printing and duplication, Auto-Advance playback delay, and some bug fixes as part of v428) later in 2025… but mostly I’ve been working on a long-term project that started in 2024 and has been in the coding phase for nearly a year.

TL;DR: This substantial update is available to try out now through the beta website, the iOS SM Beta app, and the Android app by opting in through that link. Please test it out and give me feedback!

For a full list of what’s new, check out the release notes.

It’s tempting to look back and craft a clean narrative about how this update came to be—the grand vision for the update, the milestones crossed as it took shape, the obstacles we overcame along the way… but the truth is both simpler and more messy than that:

• Strum Machine needed a cohesive, app-wide Settings UI, both to replace the “Advanced Settings” page which had outgrown its moniker and to pave the way for more settings to be added in the future. Tyler and I started design work on this back in 2024 as a “backburner” task between working on other projects like band presets and walking bass.

• The current song playback page design, basically unchanged since 2018, was holding me back from some improvements I wanted to make, so Tyler and I started taking a fresh look at that page in the spring of 2025, which eventually turned into a full ground-up redesign.

• I’ve wanted dark mode for years, but a laborious process of updating ~2,000 hard-coded colors across the codebase. Eventually, AI was able to help with a good chuck of the tedium of this work starting in late 2025… but I also needed to have the Settings UI built to allow the user to toggle dark mode (see above).

Each of these separate efforts snowballed into larger projects, as often happens, and eventually these snowballs (along with a pretty substantial refactoring snowball) merged together into one massive snow-boulder that… well, I try not to get updates get to such an unwieldy size, but here we are.

As it so happens, Strum Machine turns ten years old this summer. I thought “Tenth Anniversary Update” had a nice ring to it, so that’s what I decided to call this thing. 🎉

The preview version of the Tenth Anniversary Update is available now through the beta website, the iOS SM Beta app via TestFlight, and (for the first time) the Android app by opting in via that link. It may have some slightly rough edges (tell me if you find any) but it’s very close to being done.

That said, there are some BIG changes to the interface so I’m going to keep it in beta for longer than usual in order to gather feedback from users, positive and negative, and make sure that everyone’s as happy as possible with the new direction.

Redesigning the main song playback interface is not something I take lightly. As I said, it’s been more or less unchanged for nearly eight years, and I know people appreciate that kind of stability.

But in 2018, Strum Machine was still only a couple years old, and it was hard to know how it would evolve. Whereas at this point, I think I’ve got a good grasp of what Strum Machine is; where it will go as well as where it won’t. Plus I’m working with an actual professional designer now instead of piecing together UIs myself, which has totally changed the game.

My goal, therefore, has been for this to be the last big redesign of the main playback interface. Not the last time it will change at all—I’ve got a few more features to slot in later on, and I’m sure we’ll find ways to refine and polish what we’ve done here—but as far as major changes to the player go, this should (hopefully) be it.

Please try the beta version and let me know what you think! Don’t hold back on your feedback: if you don’t like it or miss something about the old interface, I want to know!

Cheers,
Luke

No AI was used in the writing of this newsletter.