Get with the programmers

United Plugins’ Jakub Tureček extols the power of collaboration in the development world

“Consistency is not very inspiring, is it? Expect the unexpected”

Tell us how United Plugins came to be. JT “We – SounDevice Studio, FireSonic and JMG Sound – worked on several projects together over the years, and the Internet knows no boundaries, so online collaborations led to the current state of United Plugins, where part of the team is in the Czech Republic and JMG Sound is in England. Prague’s music production scene is basically a village, so we were all kind of connected anyway. ”

How helpful has having the involvement of MeldaProduction been? JT “Well, MeldaProduction is the catalyst. United Plugins uses some of their programming capacity and their licensing system, and a lot of their experience, too. Building such things from scratch could have been hard, causing all our initial enthusiasm to fade away before anything else could even start happening. Thanks to Melda, we could concentrate on sound rather than building a system from scratch. It’s been a great booster.”

How do the three developer companies complement each other? JT “We are people with different tastes, musical needs and attitudes. We feel that those dissimilarities help us to come up with different ideas and make our portfolio as colourful as possible.”

Your plugins are obviously aiming to strike a balance between ease-of-use and ‘professional’ processing quality. How do you find that balance, and what challenges does it present?

JT “This is really very individual and personal. We don’t create plugins just to create plugins – we aim to create stuff that we would use in our workflows. For example, Jason, of JMG Sound – the author of Hyperspace (and Hyperspace CM) – is a sound designer, so you might expect very complex tools with a chance to tweak every little detail from him. On the other hand, Boris Carloff, of SounDevice Digital, has the philosophy that: ‘If I don‘t get great sound out of it in a few minutes, I’m using another plugin’. No time Toulouse, as the French would say.”

How much crossover is there between the three developers in terms of helping each other out with projects?

JT “A lot. We’re like collaborating bands. We’re both consultants and opponents for each other. If you can’t convince friends your plugin is good, how do you convince a real audience? We throw ideas for products at each other: ‘I’ve got this song idea, but it suits your band better…”

How do the three developers collaborate in terms of keeping a consistent brand identity throughout all United Plugin releases? JT “United Plugins should be an inconsistent palette of various tools. Each team uses different graphic designers. Each has a different approach and ideas. Consistency is not very inspiring, is it? Expect the unexpected.”

What’s next for United Plugins??

JT “A new brand will debut with its first plugin soon. It has an innovative attitude to both sound and GUI, but we can’t say more at the moment.”