2 — What am I building?. Here’s the beautiful design I shared in…
By: Nicholas Laroche
Tags: Technology, Music Production, Design Process, Remote Collaboration

BeatConnect’s first design

Here’s the beautiful design I shared in my last post, the first tangible element of what would become BeatConnect. Excitedly and proudly I show this to my buddies and Alex. “Guys look! It’s awesome right?! We can see each other and send music!!” I was greeted with the deafening sound of silence and polite “oh that’s nice”, like my grandma used to say when I was 4 years old and scribbled something incomprehensible with red crayon on construction paper.

Still there was something there… It had the parts I was looking for, but my vision for how this would turn out was still a bit muddy in my mind, if that wasn’t obvious by looking at the design. I figured I might as well just get my hands dirty and see if I could actually build it.

Now back in my heyday I used to really enjoy coding; I got into it because I was into gaming, did a few projects, even worked professionally for a few years before getting lured into management for the promise of paychecks without actually needing to produce any work other than telling people that they’re doing a good job and frowning if they’re late. I’m a little / very rusty but used to be decent enough and I figured this was a worthwhile project to try and dust off my skills. I just needed to decide on an approach of how I wanted to build it and how it would actually work.

One particular thing to note with beat makers and producers is that we are very religious about our software, even though we don’t really understand how to use it. It’s almost a defining characteristic, like looking at t-shirts on a metalhead before a concert. Ableton, Reason, Pro Tools, etc. we are brand fanboys until we die and nothing will make us change our minds. Now there is a reason for this: music is complicated, music technology especially so. I remember the first time I opened up Reason and I just stared at all the knobs and buttons and digital cables flying all over the place. It’s almost unreal.

I actually love Reason but yeah you get the point..

So you can imagine that after a ridiculous amount of time and hair-loss once we eventually figure out what button will make a pleasing sound come out of our speakers we never let that button go; it becomes our safe space, our haven. We feel at peace with this button. But that other software? Sure, it may be cool and have pretty colours… but it’s not the same button. It’s a DIFFERENT button. Now I need to do the whole mating ritual all over again! And then… it doesn’t sound the same :(

It’s an important topic because I knew if I was going to build something no matter how good it was there was no point in trying to get anyone to switch their DAW (Digital audio workstation, the music software). So I decided to try and make this work as a plugin. One of the fun parts of music production is that you can always add a new piece of gear to expand your repertoire that will add new sounds or modify your sounds with crazy effects; it’s like an artist getting to choose from new colours except there seems to be a never-ending cascade of new colours to choose from.

Back in the day you would have to go to the music store and shell out your life savings for a fancy new piece of equipment or new guitar. These days though you can hop online and just download some virtual instruments (VSTs). The beauty of these is that they are plug-ins and you can slap them into any DAW and then voila! New sounds!

So that was the angle and strategy: If I could make a VST that could connect to other DAWs, then I’m able to make music remotely and I’ve solved the issue of producers being scared of new software!