Audible Genius Podcast
Being a musician today can mean so many different things. In the Audible Genius Podcast you’ll hear the stories of the people who live, work, and play in today’s vast music landscape. And through their experience see just how big the world of music truly is.
Audible Genius Podcast
Artemiy Pavlov's Sonic Journey: From Synths to Software
Buckle up and join us as we embark on an electrifying journey into the world of sound with Artemiy Pavlov! Artemiy, a highly sought-after sound designer and the genius behind the innovative music software company, Sinevibes, takes us through his remarkable progression from a synth enthusiast to providing his expertise to industry-leading brands like Spectrasonics, KORG, Native Instruments, and Roland, and finally creating music software. We dive deep into the world of audio plugins, exploring both simple and complex software, as well as KORG's unique hardware hosting platform.
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Welcome to the Audible Genius podcast, where we take a behind the scenes look at being a musician. I'm Joe Hanley and today I'm talking to Artemy Pavlov, an accomplished sound designer and the man behind the innovative music software company, SignVibes. We're going to walk through his journey from a lover of synths to a sound designer for well-known audio brands, to a music software coder and creator. Let's get started so. You do sound design and consultancy for other companies and you have your own plug-in company With your sound design and consultant work. You've worked with some big companies like Spectra, Sonics, Korg, Native Instruments and also Roland, where you did some work on some of their big synths and keyboards, like V-Synth, Phantom G, Jupiter, Haiti. What stuff did you do for those keyboards?
Artemiy Pavlov:Well, yeah, roland was. The collaboration with this company was pretty much the first thing that I ever did in this whole field. So my sound design career pretty much started with Roland Instruments back in 2003 or 2004, I believe. So, yeah, I've done a lot of stuff basically for the Phantom X, juno G, phantom G, I've done presets, and for the V-Synth, for instance, I've also done both the presets I mean the patches and the factory sample content. And of course, I did presets for the Jupiter Haiti, for A-S-H-O-1, a few other machines. I mean, I keep forgetting already. So, yeah, yeah, yes, that's pretty much.
Joe Hanley:Oh, that's pretty cool. Your first opportunity was with a major company like Roland. How did you come across that opportunity?
Artemiy Pavlov:It was a very like a multi-step I don't know. It happened in several steps. All of them were kind of interesting. I was a huge fan of Roland X-P80 workstation, which I had for a few years back in those days and I really loved. You know pretty much everything about it. And a few years after I got it, roland released the Phantom and then they released the Phantom S, which included sampling, and I was so excited about it because I've been dreaming about, you know, having a workstation with great synthesis capabilities as well as sampling and effects in one box, and I got so excited about it that I've decided to start like a mini-community online.
Artemiy Pavlov:And that was very early days of the internet. Still there were no social networks and everything was happening on forums, if you remember those glorious days. So anything you would want to share with anyone that will have to be on some forum. So that was actually a forum called Harmony Central I'm not sure if it's still there and there was like a hangout zone for Roland fans and I was very, very loud over there. I was I think I was like 22 at that moment and I was still a student and I had no money. Basically, I just had the X-P80, and I had some savings over there and I still couldn't afford the Phantom S, but I was so pumped about it there was no such word back in those days though. Anyway, I was really so excited about this instrument that I was like thinking about it, you know, each and every day, and I started a website called Phantomized, which I probably was Phantomized by the instrument, so it was like a fan website, basically, with a few pages like linking to various resources pictures, youtube videos and stuff like that, and you know, all of the stuff that I was gathering on that website really caught, you know, interest of many users forum users at Harmony Central. They said, hey, why don't you start a forum? So I actually opened a forum on this website, and it got like 1,000 users in just a few months. It got very, very popular, and I think, like at some point you know, there were so many people there there were I was actually giving them advice on the forum regarding the instrument, and because I had a chance to receive the user manual of it, one of the users scanned it for me. He couldn't download it back in the day, roland would not allow this, so one of the guys over there scanned the user manual for me, which I read. I don't know, that was a maniac. So and now I knew the instrument better than most people who had it and I still didn't have it. So, long story short, when people found out that I still don't have the instrument because I lacked cash to buy it, they actually started like a fundraiser. So they gathered some money so I could sell my XB80, add the money and buy the Phantom S. So that's how I got it, basically thanks to that community.
Artemiy Pavlov:That was pretty amazing back in the day and so I started doing like a ton of stuff with it custom presets, doing like little productions, demos, playing with effects and resampling and everything. And that website, like I said, it was very popular and it caught attention of Roland and eventually one of their sound designers, stefan Pijen from Belgium, who is a very dear friend of mine now of almost 20 years. So he said, hey, why don't you do like a test project for us? Because the stuff that you do sounds very interesting, the sounds and everything.
Artemiy Pavlov:So the first project that they gave me was the Roland Phantom XA, which was like a simplified version of the Phantom X, and I did one of the factory demos for it and a few months after that they said like you got accepted for something like that and I got two projects to work on. That was the V-Synth 2.0 and V-Synth. I believe that was. Yes, that was the V-Synth 2.0 and V-Synth XT. So there was like a fresh factory bang for it that we worked on so from my side, which it included both samples and patches, and there was a Phantom X 2.0 update for which I also did presets. So that was kind of the start.
Joe Hanley:So you didn't actually have the Phantom X or the user manual when you started talking on the forums a lot and starting the website about it.
Artemiy Pavlov:Yeah, I was quite a fanatic of reading manuals. For some reason, it was the same thing with the XB80. That was the Phantom S, the model that preceded the X, but they were pretty simple.
Joe Hanley:And how did you become such sort of like an expert in it before you even had it? Like where were you getting your knowledge at the time?
Artemiy Pavlov:I just don't think I had anything else to do. That was that exciting to me. I don't know. I was just I don't know. I was chasing the dream and it's like, let's say, you dream of some car or you dream of some location you want to go to. You would just spend days and weeks and months studying everything about it, like you just can't wait to get there, you know to get that thing, and so on, and so on and so on. And that was the case with the XB80 as well. Before I could persuade my dad to buy it for me, I knew everything about it. I didn't have the manual, but I had the list of waveforms effector waveforms that I knew which waveforms I would use when I would have it and switch it on. So that was pretty ridiculous, I don't know.
Joe Hanley:That's great.
Artemiy Pavlov:So I actually I still remember I would even go to a print shop because I have no, I don't know. I actually had no computer, like in the late nineties, and I would have to go with a floppy disk with the list of preset waveforms. I would go to a print shop, I would, you know, have them print those for me and I had them literally like on my bedside table so I could check them out if I want to, which is like I don't know. And I was looking at the names of the waveforms and I was imagining how they could sound, which was pretty crazy. None of them really sounded the way I imagined.
Artemiy Pavlov:At the end, but that's what I did, I think back in those days, because we had so little info coming upon us, I could say it's no computer, no internet. I mean I had internet in my like what we called like an interned room in my university. That's where you could go online, you know, in one of the shared computers. So anyway, pretty much everything was in our heads, like if you had no photo camera, you would memorize, you know the event, you would keep it in your head. So I think imagination was much more, I mean memory, and imagination was much more important. It was a much bigger part of you in the 90s, not because of the 90s themselves, but because we didn't have all of this tech you know, in our pocket, on our table, in our bag, everywhere.
Artemiy Pavlov:Right now it's pretty much like augmented for us. You know what I'm saying. We have like our visual memories augmented by the photos on the phone and so on and so on, all of the things we kind of delegated part of our brain activities to computers. So I guess back in those days, that's how I think I developed, you know everything. It was just stuff happening in my head which was almost fitting on itself. It's like you fit it a little bit and it would then start creating what it wanted to create because it had nothing else to do. You couldn't go online and watch someone else do something. You would have to do it yourself for yourself.
Joe Hanley:That is very cool.
Artemiy Pavlov:I couldn't go and watch someone jam with a synthesizer online. I had to go and jam with my own synthesizer. So it was kind of you would be spending time being creative, being imaginative, no matter what, because that was the only thing you could do actually.
Joe Hanley:Now, of course, nowadays there are so many resources to learn synthesis and sound design and, for our listeners, if you're interested in learning how to design your own sounds with a synth, I highly recommend Centorial, a super effective course that we here at Audible Genius created. It'll take you by the hand and start from the very beginning, showing you how to program a synthesizer, and it comes with a built-in soft synth that you'll make hundreds of sounds on as you progress through the course. By the end, you'll be making your own sounds intuitively and completely by ear. And for our loyal podcast listeners, you can get 20% off Centorial this month with coupon code DSP. Check it out at Centorialcom. And were you playing in bands or anything like that with your synth, or is it more just?
Joe Hanley:like at home kind of experimenting and things like that?
Artemiy Pavlov:No, no, I was. I did a few performances like a paired with a DJ in a few clubs, but it was a bit difficult because I was just a student that didn't have a car and paying for a taxi wasn't really an option either, so I would have to literally just ask my dad or ask somebody who had a car to help me to support the instrument to the club. So I didn't do it that much. But I was mostly producing. So I was doing sound design and production and basically the timeline was, you know, as years passed, I was using more and more of my own sounds in the music. So, you know, I started doing like 50-50,. Then I switched to only synth sounds and sample drums and later on I would start designing my own drums and using all those.
Artemiy Pavlov:So it's not like I've ever released anything, I'm just saying I was trying to, you know, make myself do everything. You know, every aspect of the production had to be in my control. That's how I ended up doing DSP, because I was like oh, it's like you know, in the anecdote with the drums, if you know it, I ended up. You know, let's say I've learned the synthesis engine. Now I know everything about it. I've learned all of the effects. Now what to do next? I thought I should create my own. Then, if what you have is not enough, why don't you go and do something in that field?
Joe Hanley:That curiosity about exactly how these effects are being made, how the synth engines are being made. That's what led you to start making your own plugins.
Artemiy Pavlov:Yeah, exactly, I'm now tracing it back to those stands. When I was using those Roland instruments. The effects back in the day were so incredible All of the filters and distortion choruses, reverbs and everything. I liked them so much and there were a huge mystery for me. I was like, how do they do those? I was imagining the authors of these algorithms, who are super humans to me, who can create those. It was like a miracle for me Now that there is the Dreadbox Typhon which has my effects on it. Only a few years after we did that one, I realized wait a sec. 20 years ago I was marveling at the effects built into a synth. Now there's a synth with my effects on it. I didn't even realize it that. Oh wow, so it actually happened. I'm now one of these super humans, I guess. So it was pretty amazing. I didn't think about it. It was never a goal. I just traced it back to those days when I was stunned by these instruments and suddenly I realized, oh, I'm actually doing this kind of stuff myself now.
Joe Hanley:So when you decided that you wanted to start learning DSP which for our listeners is basically like coding audio, the specific stuff that actually makes the effects and the synths to the sound, that part of the code how did you go about learning that?
Artemiy Pavlov:Initially it was just a lot of experimentation, because I was still a student back when I started playing with doing audio processing. I think it was like basically around those same years, like 2004, 2005, something like that, I probably. I think that was just after I graduated. So, and since my major was in physics, I had a pretty serious background in all of these. You know waveforms and waves, electromagnetism and these things. So. But I still I was mainly educated in radio waves, not in audio, although my dad used to be an audio engineer but just the background in math and general understanding of how things, how waves, propagate, what happens when they reflect, when they sum, when there's distortion, like nonlinearities, when they propagate. These things. I understood them like it was like an alphabet for me. I could you know, it was second nature. So once I started, once I saw, I think back in those days, I started yeah, that is right, I actually started playing with Linux back in those days and it had a very basic plugin format. I think that's how it started for me. I started playing with the like initial project, which was super, super basic, and once I saw how audio is being fed into the plugin and out of it and hey, that's the bit where, you know, the bit in between is what happens to the sound. So I started you know the obvious things, you know creating my own like amplifier. That's what everybody does in the beginning, just to gain control.
Artemiy Pavlov:And then I started thinking about, I was somehow obsessed with sine waves that's where the company name came from sine vibes, because the sine wave was always the basis of all of the formulas that we've had in physics. I, you know, I knew that that was like the origin of everything. So to me, working with sines meant that you're working with the most fundamental part of sound, whether that be, you know, harmonic series or just a single sine oscillator, or you would use. I thought it would be cool to use the sine wave to shape another sine wave. So that's how I came up with my wave shapers. In the beginning I was essentially playing with them, you know, playing with sines as both the source of sound and the distortion algorithm, and so on and so on. So that's basically how I started. I think, once again, a lot of it was just my imagination. I was just dreaming things up, so to speak, and that's how we started.
Joe Hanley:And so you're making plugins for yourself, but at some point you decided to start sine vibes, which is the company you run, which you make and sell plugins. What point did you decide? You know I'm going to turn this into a company, into a livelihood.
Artemiy Pavlov:Well, sine vibes started. You know, I had like four or five different brands that I used to sell my own sound packs first, and those were pretty successful. Then, you know, I switched to sine vibes as the final name for those sound packs and for, I believe, like for four or five years, that was the only type of product that I sold. But again, like, I first started with presets for hardware instruments and then I started doing presets for software instruments and then again, as I was using those, I was like, hey, I'm kind of bored with the stuff that everybody's doing. I should do something I think is worth doing and is absent on the market. So I started playing with a plugin template on the Mac that I had, you know, at that moment, and if you you know, I think the first thing that I did was I took those wave shapers that I experimented with back in the Linux days and I basically took that idea a little further, added modulation and that was the first plugin to release. It was like a wave shaper which you could modulate. The curvature of the effect would be kind of dynamic and it was modulated by a couple of fellow foes. So that was the first plugin that I did.
Artemiy Pavlov:But again I don't know. It's not like I don't really. I didn't come from the standpoint of how to make money, rather like oh, I have this idea, what if somebody likes it? It actually pays for it. But it's usually like I have to build it first without knowing whether it's going to succeed or not. I have to try. So it's never like oh, what's trending now? Oh, what do producers need these days? The most? It's mostly like oh, I have this idea, let's try to make a product out of it. So in many ways I would say the stuff that I'm doing now is kind of up with the times, because I'm always listening to modern music and I'm kind of hearing how they say it now, vibing with it. So I'm getting inspired by different character of sound, different types of different ways people manipulate sound. So I don't try to copy what's being done, but I get in the same, I would say, stylistic mood as these tracks are made and it kind of shapes my overall feeling of what needs to be where a certain algorithm needs to be sonically.
Joe Hanley:So then, rather than follow trends or make plugs that you think are going to be popular, it's more about what's inspiring you at the moment, what you think would be really interesting and musically interesting.
Artemiy Pavlov:Yeah, yeah, usually it's actually half of the time actually really enough. The plugins that I think are just a little too simple. They just become way more popular than the ones that I would be sweating myself calibrating and stuff Like this year. For instance, the plugin that I've released calls SKU, which is a reverser, which is like. There are many reversers out there, but mine had a very simple way to bend the playback curve so you could have various interesting scratch effects and pitch bend effects, just like with a single knob action, and that one sold like crazy compared to other plugins which took maybe like five times more effort to develop. So it's never yeah, that's interesting. You never know until you try. So you never know until you release something.
Joe Hanley:Yeah, I was looking at SKU and that is really interesting. It plays the audio back live and it even had like a rhythmic component to it where you can sort of change the rhythm of how, or like the time signature of how it plays it back.
Artemiy Pavlov:Yeah, yeah, the thing is like traditionally people think of reversers as reversing just your standard, like quarter note, eighth note, health bar, full bar, two bars, which is most people will go for that. But since I was doing it, I was like I always get these requests by people oh, please make it go 7, 9th or 5, 13th. I'm like why would you want that? But I thought who I am to decide what rhythm people want to play? It's just like just a UI element. Why would I not include that?
Artemiy Pavlov:If you deliberately have to limit the plug-in to certain numbers, I've decided not to. So it goes from 1, 16th to 16 bars and you can pick any value of the fraction that you want. It's as simple as that and it keeps it synced to the DAW steel. But it lets you do these very interesting kind of glitchy things. And when you apply the playback curve onto the reverse chunk and if you mix it with the original, it kind of makes like a chorus effect as well, and that chorus is going to be, let's say, is going to be pretty. You kind of lock to the rhythm, which is also quite interesting. So a lot of hybrid effects are possible when you just push it a little further from what users expect.
Joe Hanley:Yeah, that's one thing I noticed about your plugins is that even a typical plug-in like, say, a reverb like everyone called Albedo, it's not a typical reverb, Like I was listening to some of the examples and it's really cool. It's like this almost intentionally artificial sort of strange or interesting, beautiful sounding reverb. Is that kind of one of your intentions with each one to do some element that isn't typical?
Artemiy Pavlov:Oh, definitely, yeah, there are definitely things. It's not like I, um, they just come as ideas. That's how I can tell you. It's not like I. It's like, like I have a I don't know Wide board and, like you know, bullet point number five, make it original, like come up with the parameter that nobody else has. So that's never really something that I that I have to like make myself do, but rather, you know, anytime I do something I come up with something with an idea that does just pushes it a little further than then. You know it has been pushed before.
Artemiy Pavlov:If there was a this type of effect, for instance, one of the things which, which is pretty, it's so basic, it's, it's so simple that you know, speaking about it is like what is in it, like okay. But for instance, in the hollow Reverb, what I did is Usually in in in reverb you have a pre, pre delay parameter. So we delays the delay tail, oh, sorry, it delays the reverb tail, so that it happens a Little further in time after the sound starts. That's how you can kind of separate it from from the sound a bit and not make the mix to muddy, especially with with big sounding reverbs. It's a very important feature, because otherwise you know Every note you play is gonna be mixed with the verb instantly.
Artemiy Pavlov:So the pre delay kind of Basically shifts the whole audio timeline of the wet signal, and and then I thought, why don't we have a sort of like a Negative pre delay? That would mean we're delaying, we're not delaying the reverb signal, we're delaying the dry signal. What happens is that the reverb sound sounds starts sounding first and it kind of fades into the original sound. So it almost sounds like both a reversed and Usual reverb. Especially when you have a diffusion stage on, it's almost like you are adding a separate attack portion to the note and then there is a reverb after that. So it's kind of like and so it's it's. It's almost silly talking about it because it's such a basic idea Yet like I haven't seen it anywhere else.
Joe Hanley:Now people. Yeah, I've heard of a negative pre-tall. It's like super, super basic so do you ever get a sense from the people that are using it whether they're using Specific features like that or not? Do you have any idea, like how popular certain aspects of your plugins are?
Artemiy Pavlov:Well, I've only heard comments like oh, it's such a small thing, but it changes. You know everything. So, because usually you would have to, you could do it before that manually. You would have to have the reverb on the send track, for instance, or, like you know, do a duplicate track and you would Leave this and send Sorry, the return signal as it is, and then you would delay the original, and I believe many productions did that.
Artemiy Pavlov:Now, that's how the true reversed reverb is done. Okay, you, you, you reverse the audio, send it to a reverb, reversed again, that's how the verb sounds before the signal. But you have to do it manually. So in this one it's not a reversed reverb, but it's the attack portion of the reverb that can precede dry sound. So it still sounds a bit different. But once again, I mean, it's so, so basic. So in in any plugin that I, you know, I've designed, there's always this, this, something that's oh, it's taking things further a little bit. So, not at all of them, I don't think so. But Again, I'm not really trying to Push myself into doing that, but it just, it's just a nature for me to. Sometimes you come up with something. You say, oh, I'm a genius. But then you discover somebody did it like 10 years ago. Like, oh, I should. I should have read the internet more so, but you're kind of proud that you came up with the idea, but it's useless because it's been done.
Joe Hanley:So do you so it sounds like you're able to really tap into like the the more a creative musical side of your brain. We're developing these plugins. Even though you know coding, it can be a very analytical process. Do you ever find it's kind of tough to Use both those sides of your brain at the same time, or is it kind of a fluid process for you?
Artemiy Pavlov:I Think it's always a mix of things. I wouldn't. You know, I'm not really a developer in the sense that I can concentrate in coding for a very long time. Usually it's. It's a lot of Imagination, trying to imagine how things would work in my head, then doing a prototype, and the prototype would always be Rehearsed. So because I'm doing these things mostly alone, I mean, I have a co-developer, steven, who is doing Things, but you know, he's done a few DSP beads back in a day, but that was his task he was. He was doing it alone with no input from myself. Same thing with me. He, same thing with me.
Artemiy Pavlov:I would, since I'm the, the one who, let's say, gives the verdict to how, how the code sounds. I do it Like in real time. So I kind of lead the algorithm in a way. I think it should go so and I've always, I always. I don't try, I don't just Do like basic tests like within, let's say, with some Basic waveforms and stuff I actually have recordings of like drums, since Electric guitar that I keep fitting into the algorithm all the time.
Artemiy Pavlov:So I would, I would do some changes and feed these different Audio types of audio sources and see what it does, and I kind of try to balance everything on the way, so it's not like I would spend an hour doing something and I would. I would then have to show the output audio to somebody who would Say, oh, it sounds good and and tell me where to go next. It's always because it's all within me. I Just I just sit like this for hours and I just I just go somewhere, so and and the basically, yeah, this the sounds that I use as the sources they kind of lead me to to.
Joe Hanley:You know that destination, you know yeah, that kind of I can relate to that. Having that sort of just that automatic connection between Listening to and just hearing what it does musically and also being the person who's coding it, like those two things to be Fully informed of each other because they're in one brain, is incredibly valuable. Do you? Do you ever send out early stuff before it's released to some musicians or people that try it out just to see another perspective?
Artemiy Pavlov:very rarely, honestly speaking. Yeah, mostly because you know all of the guys that that are like in my vicinity, my friends. They are very busy people. So there are extremely like high-level professionals, the ones that I would love to hear from mostly not like you know, just Some, some people that was signed up for you beta testing lists, I would say, I would say it like that, but they're so busy that, yeah, I almost never hear anything from them.
Artemiy Pavlov:So pretty much nobody gets to hear the plugin before it's released. So I mean, I would send demos To you know, and I would actually publish teaser audio on our social media and, basically, I kind of gauge the excitement of the users To see, you know, if, to see like, oh, am I doing something interesting? Or people find it a little boring, so, and it's not like I really analyze it, it doesn't really shape the final product, but, let's say, most of the time people are actually excited and it helps me, like you know, drive, help helps drive my you know development process to actually finalize the products and, you know, focus on on the process.
Joe Hanley:Which plugins the most popular one or gotten the biggest response.
Artemiy Pavlov:In terms of this number of sales sure yeah it's cute, okay, oh, it's like yeah.
Artemiy Pavlov:So I'm just saying it's. It sold In nine months. It sold as many copies as Elbido did in two years. So it's like it's selling I could almost three times the rate, which is, I mean, it's not a shame Because it's my product, right, but it kind of is a shame because Elbido took way more time to develop in. You know, conceptually it's a much more complicated product, but I'm just saying not, not everyone wants as a physical product, somebody just want to have some fun. Yeah, that's what skew is. It's like it's stupid fun. Yeah, I've actually I did. I have done quite a few demos In the past few weeks and we actually released an update for it with more curves and yeah, it's been received so well again. And I kept doing this demos because I couldn't stop anything I throw into it. It's just like a. I don't know it's like that. I know he just makes it. It's just fun, I don't know.
Joe Hanley:I can see that it's more like apparently fun. It gets obvious how enjoyable this plugin would be, what it's gonna do.
Artemiy Pavlov:Yeah, it's like a reverb, like I know where I need a reverb, but maybe I won't really enjoy until I'm using Honestly speaking, yeah, I, I developed the reverse algorithm to have it as part of our DSP collection for licensing and I wasn't intending to release a reversal like at all, because everybody has it. You know why would we have the reversal? You know it makes no, you know no sense. But at some point I was like looking at the playhead, the math, and I was like what if we curve it? What if we bend it? What if the time was non-linear? So and I and I and I maps it to like an exponential curve, and I was like that's a product, so in a. Then I started like coming up with other different curves and Is just developing. It was was immense fun.
Artemiy Pavlov:So as well, so so you never know, you know now your plugins can also be.
Joe Hanley:You know, people buy them, load them in their DAWs, like we do all plugins, but you can also load them into certain corg since, like the mini log Xd, for example, which I have right behind me, oh and. I I guess I wasn't fully aware of just how much stuff you can like plug into it. I didn't. I wasn't really where there were these plug-in architectures that corg lets you put into. Some of their sense is is making your plug-in Compatible with that significantly more work, or is it a whole separate thing? I?
Artemiy Pavlov:Would say it is a whole separate thing, because you can't really like work, the plug-in to this architecture, for two reasons. First of all, there's very limited resources on this platform. I'm talking about like memory and processing capabilities and the second thing is obviously the format is where Is is way more basic, so you don't have as many parameters. Okay, so you kind of have to be I would say you have to be more inventive to come up with something that's, let's say, radically different from your standard. Delays in the courses and filters and and I I like this platform for these exact reasons that you have to you really have to push yourselves to come up with something that's Significantly more interesting than the standard stuff. At the same time, it actually is able to run on this platform. Platform, did I say play form?
Joe Hanley:I think so.
Artemiy Pavlov:It is a play form because you're playing with it. So, and honestly speaking, it's a. I tried to spend like one month focusing on the desktop, on a desk new desktop plug-in and the next month I would focus on a new cork plug-in, because Each each of these kind of draws me in and if I make cork plug-ins for too long I can actually forget that the desktop plug-ins exist.
Joe Hanley:Okay.
Artemiy Pavlov:It's just so rewarding to, I mean. I mean it's kind of the tick-tility that we were hoping to get from plugins with touch screens, but it's, it's a huge difference still, because you have you have the these components in hardware instrument with no notification center, with no Safari and None of that stuff. So and it's pretty incredible that the this platform actually got developed and and it's just, it's just super fun, do you find so yeah, so you have to work within limitations there, like you were talking about.
Joe Hanley:Do you find that's Kind of relieving in a sense, where you know when you're making a plug-in for a desktop, it's unlimited what you can do essentially, but then when you're suddenly forced to work with limitations, it's Kind of a relief in a sense?
Artemiy Pavlov:Yes, yes, in a sense it is. I mean you, you, if you have a list of a hundred things you can do, what exactly do you do? I mean, if you, if 90% of those cannot be done, like period, it's too much. Then you have 10, which is like wow, you can actually start doing something because You've crossed out, you know everything else you can focus on on one of these things. So it's exactly that.
Artemiy Pavlov:So, and it's actually you know of the funny thing that there are plugins which allow you to embed samples in them, with very low quality, obviously, because there is a, there's a limit to, you know, there's there's the size limit of the plug-in itself, which can be only, like a, I feel like a couple dozen kilobytes. So how much sample Data can you embed it into that? And I've, I've played with the idea of embedding some samples just for fun, but then I thought, because the code, you can actually have way more sound generating code in there. Why don't I try to Do something else? Because I want to something like a, like a drum synth, and I thought, okay, well, why don't I use that memory where the samples could be actually as the memory to hold the presets? So I created the, a synth engine which is like a, which is able to kind of reconfigure itself in real time Depending on which key you press. It would load up preset from that memory. It would kind of configure itself in real time and play that preset. So and each preset is something like 35 parameters. Some of them are like it's actually a bit more, because some of the parameters are bipolar and, for instance, if it's positive, if it's one filter, type slow pass filter, if it's negative, it's a high pass filter, so that you're using like each bit of memory, wow, to, to to max out what you can do.
Artemiy Pavlov:So that's how I made groove, which is a essentially like a multi-temporal bass and drum synth. So instead of you know embedding, you know a bunch of low-fi samples, I'm actually I've actually embedded a preset bank with Almost a hundred bass, drum and percussion sounds. So that was quite an achievement on that platform, because it's it's pretty much like what you would do in late 80s, I believe, with with that kind of limited RAM and CPU power. So and that is, I mean, is so rewarding to have to have this kind of stuff, because there is so much trickery you need to to Come up with for that stuff to make work, so that it's a completely different type of enjoyment for for the developer. I Mean compared to the desktop, where you can be pretty much like lavish with the resources. Ah yeah, we can run a hundred oscillators Nothing gonna happen.
Joe Hanley:That's fascinating. So it's one synth engine. But you've you've programmed a bunch of different drum sounds with the synth engine and it just switches between those sounds depending on which key you play.
Artemiy Pavlov:Yeah, exactly, that's right. So so because I mean you have the node information coming in so you can logically split the keyboard into zones, and then your parameters. The parameters of the plug-in are not the parameters of the synth engine, they just keep saying, oh, preset number one or number seven, whatever. So, and that bank of presets, each of them, is holding the parameters for the synth engine. So you've picked your sounds and then you know, depending on the key press, it decides what to do. So some of the zones are chromatic, some of them are not, so it's kind of like a, like a little groove box in in the in the synth. So that was brought. That was pretty much the I would say, the biggest technical achievement for me on that platform, because it took it to to that kind of level. Yeah, that's, I also go ahead. No, no, no.
Joe Hanley:I also as soon as you have another one for FM synthesis and that one, that one really kind of blew my mind because you know I bought this mini log XD. You know, okay, this is a subtractive synth. It's got a wavetable thing, but for most part it's a subtractive sin. That's what this synth is. And then suddenly I'm looking at your plug is I'm like wait a minute, I can actually turn this into an FM synth, like that idea is crazy in a hardware synth.
Artemiy Pavlov:Yeah, yeah, that one was also, yeah, very nicely received by the public and I believe it's actually the second best-selling plug-in After skew, really, so it's, it's sold better than the none of the other desktop ones. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it was like people could not believe what, what they, what they got, because it's essentially now it's a plug-in. Initially, like Korg was saying, oh, you could have an oscillator model In in a, in a plug-in, you know. And I was like, oh, that's, that's great, like you can have like a super saw, you could have like a some noise, the custom noise generator. But then I was like, why does have to be like just a waveform? I mean, if, if I started like layering oscillators, trying to run one more and more, it was able to run more. So I was like, oh, it was like it can be a complete, you know, self-contained synth engine. So that's how pretty much everything was, was was, you know, developed.
Artemiy Pavlov:It was the thinking was not to do it as a, as a, just just like a bunch of different waveforms, but a complete Synthesis method. That's really like a, you know, that's a Synth engine on its own. And now the other, and now it was. I almost like I've never thought I would do it but I give it a go and I was like I just have to do it now because it had to be done. I'm like people need this, like how? Because I'm myself not really into FM that much. But I was like I think people will be like amazed about what this can be within this instrument. So that drove me Like I wanna see what people think of it so and I started obviously it's not like I wasn't developing it in the same way I did the others Like I had to like the sound of it and it had to be designed. I had to pick which parameters to have there, how to configure them for the user. But yeah, the end result was quite, quite good.
Joe Hanley:Yeah, because FM synthesis is such a distinctly different sound than subtractive synthesis. So to think that you can change your hardware synth in such a profound way is, I guess, now I'm not surprised that it was so popular. So I know it's hard to predict that stuff ahead of time.
Artemiy Pavlov:Yeah, yeah, it's not like, oh yeah, fm is trending, I have to do this thing now. So, although it was trending at that time, but to me it was like a bunch of check boxes. I was like I wanna have as many engines, as many different engines, on this platform as possible. So we have wave shaping, we have physical modeling, we have FM, we have this kind of like percussion slash, drum slash, drum slash, bass machine. And then a year ago we released odds, which was completely.
Artemiy Pavlov:I mean, the concept of the plugin came from a different type of thinking. It wasn't coming from. Oh, what type of synthesis engine do we do? It's like how do we control it? How can we control this engine in a way that others are not doing? So I'm not sure if you've tried it or read about it.
Artemiy Pavlov:Odds actually has a bunch of different engines, like it has virtual analog, it has FM, it has a lot of other stuff going on. But the way you control it is a bit different. I mean you have 80 different engine configurations which you can pick. So let's say, oh, it's a subway form with a square wave form going into a low pass filter. That's your configuration number. I don't know five you have to look up that stuff I don't remember so and then you have a couple of parameters which control, like the envelope time, the cutoff frequency, oscillator, detune, things like that, and then it kind of sounds basic, right, but then there is a level of control over there that lets you adjust the trigger probability of the sound. It lets you randomize the transposition by octaves and fifth or just octaves or just fifth, and also allows you to randomize the parameters of the engine, such as envelope time, lfo, speed filter, cutoff frequency, fm, modulation depth, like it all depends on what type of engine you've picked.
Artemiy Pavlov:So in the end you have something that makes a different sound with every key press. It's gonna be different. So and if you can imagine, like playing an arpeggio, for instance, with just three notes actually an arpeggio, you know, just manually, you would play three notes, so and you have 50% chance of the note sounding and then the key is being transposed by plus or minus an octave, sometimes not for every press. So and you start getting this. It's almost like a generative pattern. You know the way, you know it from modular sequences, but it's built on the sound engine level here, not on the sequencer and modulation level. So in the end you get like a I don't know. I've heard so many amazing pieces of music made with it. It's ridiculous. It's like people just push a chord and just listen for a minute. They just and that's kind of that's all that. You know that it takes to, you know make music with it.
Joe Hanley:So they pick a synth engine, whether it's like a thumb or subtractive or wavetable, and then with each key press it essentially randomizes the patch in a synth.
Artemiy Pavlov:Yeah, yeah. But you control everything, like there is a table of settings that you can pick, and you pick exactly which parameters you want to randomize. Okay, oh, wow, yeah, yeah. And you adjust the trigger probability with the knob Okay, yeah, yeah so, so, like you could say and then you pick the transpose pattern, you also choose it.
Artemiy Pavlov:Is it octaves, is it fifth, is it both? And how many octaves exactly, plus or minus? So there is a, there are AT engine configurations in there and about 20, 25 ways you can use the transposition and randomization of the parameters.
Joe Hanley:Wow, so it's like a really For each.
Artemiy Pavlov:So, like, if you multiply those, it's like a I don't know thousands of ways this thing can be played, wow.
Joe Hanley:I love that probability thing where you can say pick one parameter and say just how much you want it to randomly change, if at all, if you want to like a wide range of change or a narrow range of change.
Artemiy Pavlov:Yeah, yeah, this feature was actually introduced with Groove, the Drum and Bass engine, because you can actually set any of the zones to a 50% chance of being triggered. Okay, so this means that you can have a bass pattern going on, then the kick and snare would play all the time, but then, like the hi-hats and the shaker, for instance, they have a 50% chance of being triggered. So there was it was this idea to overcome the limitation of the Miniloc DS sequencer, which is only 16 steps. You can have longer patterns, but if you put the hi-hat on all of the steps, for instance all of the 16 steps, and then you engage, 50% probability that pattern will loop but will never repeat. So it's going to be less boring, basically.
Joe Hanley:A quick word for our listeners. This tool that Artemy has designed is a really cool way to generate drum patterns. It's useful and fun to have a machine randomly composing drum patterns for you. However, you may find that at some point you want to compose your own drum patterns. To learn how to do this, I highly recommend another super effective course of ours called Building Blocks. It'll take you, step by step, through the process of writing the building blocks of beats, like drum patterns, but also bass lines, corporegressions and melodies, and it all takes place in an actual online DAW where you create music as you go. And for our loyal podcast listeners, you can get 20% off Building Blocks this month using coupon code DSP. Check it out at audiblegeniuscom. Slash Building Blocks so what's next for you?
Joe Hanley:Either with the company or with the work outside the company. What do you have plans on?
Artemiy Pavlov:I plan to work as possible for other companies. Honestly speaking, in the past few years I've been mostly doing licensing, having done much consulting or sound design.
Joe Hanley:And real quick. Licensing is where someone under company, under developer, will pay you to use your algorithms in their products.
Artemiy Pavlov:Yeah, exactly Because you can look. I won't drop any names, but there have been many significant products released in the past five, six years that used the DSP that me and Steven did. So it's been a very good experience, first of all because I mean because it's an honor to be part of these big products On one hand. On the other hand, it makes the development. I mean we need to make the code more fit.
Artemiy Pavlov:You know, when you're doing it for yourself, it can be a bit messy, not too standardized, but since we started doing licensing we had like three or four major iterations of the code when we would like revise everything, maybe once a year, go through everything okay, what needs to be improved, what needs to be optimized, what kind of coding practices we can apply that we've learned recently and they work really well, and so on and so on. So it's a way to keep your code healthy for years and you get your code in front of high-end developers working for like top companies. So if something is wrong you will know about it very quickly. So it's a way to have some sort of additional discipline when doing stuff, extra checks being extra focused. So it kind of pays back in the form of having extremely stable code Like. I will tell you one thing since we've launched the new lineup with Mac and Windows plugins two years ago, a little over two years ago I haven't heard about a single crash in two plus years, really no, not a single crash.
Joe Hanley:So, because your code has gotten so clean for the other developers that are licensing, your plugins perform better for the musicians that are using them as well.
Artemiy Pavlov:Yeah, yeah, yeah, you cannot shame yourself in front of these big guys. Yeah, you know, it's not like I wasn't taking care of the code before that, but it's just like taking the extra steps to make the API more beautiful, more compatible between different algorithms. But, you know, I think I'm at a point where I don't need this licensing to make me more disciplined. I've already trained myself enough, I would say so. But I think it's that part of licensing has been the biggest, has made the biggest influence on what I do. Then there's getting the money from that licensing, so it's actually collaboration and upping your standards and these things Very cool. So, but yeah, I'm very much focused on doing new stuff and there are, like I would say, three different directions where we're going. So one of them is obviously there's so much new stuff. You know that we would like to do, I mean, all new DSP that hasn't been released yet. And there's a new plugin that I'm working on at the moment, which is pretty interesting. It's kind of a mixture of diffusion and 3D spacing, so it's like diffusion that can happen in a kind of like a binaural way. So, and it's probably going to be called like a binaural diffusion plugin. So it's very interesting because I've taken this kind of pseudo three dimensional stereo with the fact that we've used in hollow, for instance, and some people described it that it's wider than the wide, so it kind of sounds like a wide effect, but also kind of sounds a little bit like on the inside. So it almost like when you listen to it with headphones it sounds like the reverb is both encapsulating your head and it also kind of sounds like here, like you can almost like feel the thickness of the reverb, like around and in your head. I don't know it's a weird way to describe it, but that's how it feels. So I applied the same idea onto a diffusion algorithm, so, and it spreads the signal in this kind of, you know, almost three dimensional way. So, yeah, it's a very interesting it sounds, and when, when, when that effect is modulated is also quite, quite, quite interesting, because it's not a course, it's not a phaser, it's kind of like you will have to hear it.
Artemiy Pavlov:So there's some new stuff, but also there's a lot of like 80% of my sketches and notes is the next generation versions of a lot of plugins that we have discontinued two years ago, for instance, like the fraction slicer, multi effects, slicer, sequential multi effects, sequencer, a lot of other more basic sequencer based plugins. So I'm take a lot of time to rethink those, like, what do I do to make them really next level? So there's, there's going to be like more, and I have to keep them simple. Still, I don't want to like spoil them with double the features just to warrant oh, that's a new version. You know just the one saying that. So it has to be something that's a huge advancement for those, but at the same time, it only takes like 5% more UI space. So the you know I have a lot of ideas. You just have to shape it into into a product for each and every one of them. So, yeah, that's.
Artemiy Pavlov:You know a lot of users are asking for those, obviously. So we kind of abruptly discontinued. That line, which was very weird for a lot of people to meet, was a way to say we have a fresh start, and it was a way to say we're not going to sell you the old stuff, we're only going to sell you the new stuff. That's like super, super new. So what? I want you to pay for plugins that are like 10 years old. It makes no sense to receive money for those. We want, you know, your money in case of a plugin is like really new and we will support it for you know, a lot of time.
Artemiy Pavlov:It's not like we're not supporting the older plugins. We've released new Apple Silicon compatible builds and a lot of bug fixes as well for those half a year ago and we will continue doing so. So it's not like those are forgotten. It's most like those are in maintenance mode, not in like feature update mode. So, and we actually shipped five or six plugins as free updates. So some of the products which we released like six or seven years ago, we had V2 releases for those and they were free updates. So for those who there will be more free updates as well for not for all of the plugins, but some of the older plugins. Yeah, some of the owners of those old plugins will be very happy to know about it.
Artemiy Pavlov:Cool, yeah, so, and the third thing, obviously Cork. So there's still a lot of stuff to want to do. I think most of the effects that we did and actually most of the older, older us letters that were released like three or four years ago, those will be all upgraded. So we will rethink like how, what is like we've learned a few things in the past, let's say a couple years, where we can take things a bit further. So we will be doing that for each plugin, kind of rethinking.
Artemiy Pavlov:So where do we exactly run out of CPU power? We will take the plug in to that level until it it overloads the system. Push the limit, then we dial back a little bit and that's the new release. So we try to push it like to the very max. So sometimes it's a bit too much. You know we have to really dial things back to get too excited. But that's because, like we have, you know, there's a certain limitation on, let's say, you have your RAM on the chip and there's a limit to how many times that RAM can be called for each sample. That's how. That's why you cannot run, for instance, two reverbs at the same time, because they use a lot of memory access and if you'd want to, you would not be able to because the RAM can only be. You know, it has its bandwidth.
Joe Hanley:Yeah, so a lot of stuff Well cool. Thank you so much for joining me. It's been fascinating to hear a how you got into the industry, but then also how you just sort of maintain this very artistic, inspired approach to making your plugins. I hope you continue down that road.
Artemiy Pavlov:Thank you. Yeah, I surely will. There's no other way for me, honestly.
Joe Hanley:That's great to hear.
Artemiy Pavlov:So yeah All right.
Joe Hanley:Thank you so much.
Artemiy Pavlov:Okay, thank you. Thank you very much.
Joe Hanley:Thanks for listening to the Audible Genius podcast. Now, as you listen to these musicians stories, you may find yourself wanting to make your own music, or maybe you already can, but you feel the need to brush up on fundamentals fill in some gaps. Well, I've got some super effective and engaging courses that help aspiring digital musicians find their voice and create music they love. And these courses are more than just a series of videos. They have interactive challenges in a music software environment where you actually create music as you go and get real experience.
Joe Hanley:The first course I recommend is building blocks, where you'll learn beat composition and music theory in an online music studio. Check it out at audiblegeniuscom. We also have Centorial, an award-winning course on synthesis, where you'll learn how to create your own sounds with a synthesizer. Check that out at centorialcom, and both of these courses are designed by yours truly and the team here at Audible Genius. So if you've ever had a desire to make your own music, I highly encourage you to check them out. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you on the next episode.
