schools for electrical engineering to do stuff related to music or audio it was not considered a worthy academic pursuit. Thankfully, that has changed now. At the time, the emphasis was on physical modeling of musical acoustics at CCRMA. I was into audio processing devices, speakers, and microphones. All of the other students were doing physical modeling of musical acoustics. I thought - why can't you do physical modeling of audio effects processing? It made me want to do the kind of emulations we do here at UA. How did the first UA plug-ins came about? Back '95 or '96, I was talking to my friend Dave Berners at CCRMA. I had brought along schematics of the LA-2A, and some other compressors, like the DBX 160 . We ended up talking about using physical modeling to simulate the characteristics and essence of these devices. This kicked off an ongoing discussion starting at Stanford in the mid-90s up until 2000. At this point time, the UAD-1 was on the drawing board and we needed to come up with the first set of plugs that would come out and make the UAD a viable product. So we started with the 1176, the LA2A, and a couple channel strips and other more generic stuff. We felt that magnetics were going to be one of the harder things to model on the digital side so one of the first things we did was put a transformer model together. We found my father's notes on