Get with the programmers
We rub shoulders with the donationware developers behind a slew of unique and inspiring plugins
What’s your history in music and in programming? Who’s at Noisebud, and how did it all get started?
JA “I work as a mastering engineer. I started to write code in the 80s on my Spectravideo and later Commodore before I found electronic music and dropped computing in favour of beatmaking.
“Electro-acoustic composer Sol Andersson and I formed Noisebud as a producer duo in 2008. We teamed up to produce a remix for a Luke Slater/Mote Evolver competition, which we won, so we decided to continue. Plugin development started out of necessity. We needed software, mostly for our live setup, that either didn’t exist or was too expensive. I’m able to understand and tweak existing code, but I wouldn’t try to build something from the ground up – we have Patrik [Ohlsson, maths prodigy and now C++ guru] for that.”
You’ve dabbled in instruments and ‘standard’ plugin effects, but your biggest line is in utility plugins – what caused that to happen?
JA “Our plugins are often created out of a need. For example, Listen and Midsider are both tailored to save time. I used to have a pair of Dynaudio Air 20’s in the studio and the monitor control lacked solo/mute of mid/side, so I made Listen to get around that. Even though I now have a hardware monitor control with mid/side, I still use Listen every day – I’m used to it.”
Some of your processors take inspiration from psychoacoustic principles – can these effects be useful as part of the mixing process?
JA “Absolutely, for example HaasPan sounds amazing on acoustic guitar – you get the pan effect but keep an even energy between left and right. If you mix your vocals in mono, it’ll have its own place in the mid channel, and together it’ll give you that nice, deep, expensive 3D-sounding feeling.”
Of course, our ears are the most vital tool we have for mixing, but you’ve created some visual analysers – what’s the place for these tools in music production?
JA “If you’re a bedroom producer, you probably don’t have the monitoring you need to hear the absolute low end. We’re not talking 60Hz but say 30 or even 25Hz. Even if you invested in monitoring that can reproduce those frequencies, your room most certainly can’t. Our low-end measuring plugin Evouyn will tell you where your low-end levels are at. Use it on your master bus while mixing and while mastering if you master your own stuff. If you send your material to a mastering engineer, you’ll be in for less of a surprise when you get your master back.”
“Our low-end measuring plugin Evouyn will tell you where your low-end levels are at”
What’s next from Noisebud? JA “Oh, lots of goodies! We’re working on a dynamic sidechain EQ called SichEQ that has a twist to it – one we haven’t seen before. So far, it’s very promising; it’ll do miracles with dead mixes. There’s a planned multiband version of our levelling compressor Slow, we’re going to release an update to HaasPan, and Evouyn will get a genre selector to make it easier to read.”