On Designing Plugins
by Sam, 15 August 2025

In this short, I break down one of the hardest challenges when writing plugins: keeping your vision for the overall sound when you're in the weeds trying to make some process do its individual part perfectly.
Audio is like a many-sided die: when we focus on one side, we stop being able to hear/see the others. On the mixing/mastering side, people tend to fall prey to this when focusing too much on loudness, or when soloing a single track to fix a problem, but it also goes for plugin design. When I'm working with Stan and putting together the audio chain, we have to make sure that each control doesn't step on the others as you ride it, that each part of the sound you decide to specialize doesn't work against something else you were just going heavy at last week... it's a lot, and it's why making a truly great-sounding plugin takes a long time.