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Everything a plugin company needs behind the scenes, kept as simple as it should be.

There’s a part of running a plugin or sample company that nobody talks about, because it is not the fun part. You can make an incredible product, but the moment you want to actually sell it, a long list of unglamorous problems appears. How do customers buy it. How do they get a license. How do they activate it, and what happens when they get a new computer. How do you handle downloads, updates, refunds, and the customer who emails you at midnight because something won’t authorize. None of that is music, and all of it has to work perfectly.

The problem most plugin makers run into

When you go looking for a way to handle all of this, the options tend to fall into two camps. Either you stitch together a handful of separate services and hope they play nicely, or you find a platform that does a lot but feels sprawling and overwhelming, with so many features and settings that just getting started is its own project. For a small team that mostly wants to make plugins, neither is a great place to be.

The infrastructure ends up taking time and attention that should be going into the product. We know this because we needed it ourselves before we ever offered it to anyone else.

The licensing, the delivery, the customer experience, the dashboard to manage it all, those were real problems we wanted solved cleanly for our own brands.

Klevr grew from building the thing we wished already existed.

Built to stay out of the way

Our goal with Klevr is to keep this as plug and play as possible, for the brand and for their customers. The brand keeps the relationship and the spotlight. The subdomain, the logo, and the emails a customer sees are theirs.

Behind the scenes, Klevr quietly handles the licensing, the delivery, and the activation, and gives everyone one clean place to manage it. A customer registers, activates, and manages their products without ever feeling like they were handed off to a third party. The brand runs its business without having to become a software infrastructure company on the side.

There’s a human side to this that matters just as much as the technology. When someone buys a plugin, the experience after that purchase becomes part of how they feel about the brand. A confusing activation, a slow reply, a license that won’t transfer to a new machine, those moments quietly shape whether a customer trusts a company again. We take that seriously because we feel it ourselves on both sides, as people who buy plugins and as people who sell them.

The goal isn’t just to move a license from one place to another. It’s to make sure customers feel looked after, and that brands can show up for the people who support them, without drowning in the logistics of doing it.

We’ve got real ambitions for how far this can grow, and the list of what the platform can do will keep expanding over time. But the guiding principle is not going to change. However much sits under the hood, the experience on top should feel simple, seamless, and out of the way, so the people using it can spend their energy on the part that actually matters, which is the music and the products their customers love.

It would be easy to introduce ourselves as a company that makes audio software. It would also be a little backwards. We’re musicians, engineers, producers, and songwriters who happen to build tools, and the order of those words matters more than it might seem.

Tools come from making music

The best ideas we’ve had did not come from asking what the market wants. They came from being deep in a session and running into something. A bass that would not sit with the kick. A vocal that needed presence but not more harshness. A drum bus that was almost there but missing some weight. In each case the problem was specific, the fix was some clever workaround, and somewhere in the middle of that workaround was the same quiet thought every time, which was that there really should be a tool for this.

That’s the seed. A tool that comes out of an actual piece of music carries the fingerprints of a real problem. It tends to do one thing genuinely well, because it was born to solve one thing, rather than being a feature list assembled to fill out a spec sheet.

We trust ideas that come from finishing a song a lot more than ideas that only look good written down.

We have to want to use it

Our simplest test for anything we build is whether we would actually reach for it in our own music. Not whether it demos well, not whether it has the most controls, but whether it makes us feel more creative when we’re in the middle of something. We make music in bedrooms and home studios, the same way most people reading this do, and if a tool does not earn a place in that kind of work, it has no business in anyone else’s.

We’re early in all of this, and we’ll say that plainly. We’ve been modeling gear we love, building things to test, and getting genuinely excited about how they sound. The part ahead of us, deciding what to make and where these ideas belong, is the part we’re most looking forward to. But the compass is set.

Every plugin starts as a creative decision before it becomes an engineering one, and the people making those decisions are the same people who will be using the tools in their own music, trying to finish the next song.

Modern heavy music has never had more production range, accessibility, or creative freedom than it does right now. A modern metal or hardcore record can be crushingly heavy and crystal clear at the same time, which would have sounded like a contradiction not that long ago. Looking at how the genre got here is worth a few minutes, because it says a lot about where the music is headed and why it’s such an exciting time to be making it.

Modern metal production moved into the box

The biggest shift is that the studio now mostly fits inside a computer. Tones that used to require a wall of amplifiers and a rack of outboard gear can be built entirely with plugins, and the results genuinely stand next to anything tracked the old way. Many of the most respected producers in heavy music will tell you that nearly everything they do happens in the box, and that what really defines their sound is the quality of the source, the instruments and the performances, more than any specific piece of hardware.

The gear stopped being a gatekeeper. The ideas became the thing that sets people apart.

For someone making records on a laptop in a bedroom, that’s a genuinely level playing field, and it shows in how much great heavy music now comes from exactly those setups.

The tension between polish and rawness

As the tools got more powerful, two instincts emerged. One chases polish: tight, sample reinforced drums, layered guitars, vocals sitting perfectly on top, the kind of clean, modern sheen you hear on records from bands like Bring Me The Horizon, Spiritbox, and Architects. The other chases rawness: capturing a band’s real energy with as little in the way as possible, leaning on character and feel, the approach behind a lot of the most exciting hardcore and underground heavy records. There’s a reason a band like Converge sounds the way it does, and it’s not because the production is trying to be perfect.

Neither instinct is more correct, and the most interesting records usually live somewhere in between, clean enough to translate everywhere and raw enough to feel like real people made it.

There’s also a quieter idea worth holding onto. A lot of modern heavy music piles on so many layers that it actually loses impact, and some of the most effective production comes from restraint instead, from where the kick sits, how lightly the cymbals are played, and how much space is left for the song to breathe.

Sometimes the most powerful move is leaving something out.

The line that keeps blurring

The detail we find most telling is who is making these records. Over and over, the people shaping the sound of heavy music are musicians first. They play in the bands, they write the riffs, they produce the records, and increasingly they create the tools too. Several of the names most associated with modern heavy production have gone on to create their own sample libraries, design pedals, or develop plugins. The roles of musician, producer, and developer keep collapsing into the same people.

That’s the world we feel at home in. We’re musicians and engineers who got obsessed with how records are made, and that obsession is what led us to building tools. We’re drawn to character and to feel, and we think there is plenty of room for gear made by people who are still, first and foremost, trying to finish their own songs.

We're building the new standalone drum libraries for RS Drums, and the deeper we get into it, the more we appreciate just how much hides inside a serious drum instrument. From the outside, a drum library looks simple. You load it up, you get drums.

But the gap between "plays a drum sound" and "becomes the drums in your song" is enormous, and closing it is some of the most detailed work we do.

It helps to be clear about what these actually are. A modern drum library is a heavy production tool. So much of today's music, metal especially, is built from libraries like these alongside bass libraries, amp sims, and the processing that ties everything together, and the drums carry a huge amount of that weight. Most of the people reaching for a library are producers, guitarists, and songwriters who need drums for their music, and very often those drums end up on the final release. Everything about how you build the library has to honor that.

It starts with the gear

Long before any software exists, there's already a room full of choices. Which kick, which snares, which cymbals, how the kit is tuned, which microphones capture it and where they sit. Those decisions shape the entire character of the instrument. Every piece is recorded from several microphones at once, close mics, overheads, room mics, and more, all tracked together so they line up perfectly.

The depth of the sampling is planned well in advance. How many velocity layers each element needs, which articulations to capture, how wide a dynamic range to cover so the instrument feels expressive and authentic instead of static. That planning is what gives a library its realism down the line, and it's the part you can't shortcut.

Mix-readiness comes from real processing

A kit doesn't sound finished just because it was sampled well. The mix-ready, plug-and-play sound that modern production expects comes from processing built into the instrument: compression, EQ, transient shaping, saturation, envelopes, layered one-shots, dynamic EQ and multiband compression, all working together. That's how raw samples become a sound that drops into a dense, modern mix and immediately sits right.

The way we approach this is through mix presets. Someone can load a preset and land somewhere that's already most of the way there for their production. From there it's fully customizable. Every piece of that processing is open to shape, so a producer can take the sound exactly where their song needs it to go.

Routing that fits any session

Drums live and die by the mix, so routing every microphone independently is one of the most valuable things a library can offer. Tight, dry close mics, bright overheads, big crushed room mics, all of it can go wherever someone wants in their session. Good routing lets a producer treat the library like real multitracks rather than a locked stereo sound, and that's what makes one kit able to fit a hundred different songs.

Built for e-kits, not just programming

While most producers program their parts, a huge amount of our focus goes into making the library feel incredible for drummers playing it live on an electronic kit. That's a deep field on its own. Hi-hats need to be calibrated to feel natural against a drummer's actual hardware hi-hat setup. Cymbal mutes need adjustable decay so aftertouch responds the way a real player expects. The configuration has to adapt to the wide range of e-kits people own today, and players need to be able to record their MIDI performances straight into the instrument. Getting this right is what lets a drummer sit down and feel like they're playing their own kit, and it's something we put serious work into.

Powerful without being overwhelming

One of the things we care about most is how the library feels the moment you open it. A serious production tool can easily become intimidating, and we don't want that. Someone experienced should be able to dive in and unlock the full depth of the instrument, while someone newer should be able to open it up and get exactly the result they're after right away, whatever kind of production they're working on.

Striking that balance, powerful underneath and approachable on the surface, is genuinely difficult, and it's one we care deeply about getting right.

Why we love this work

A drum library might be one of the most demanding things you can build in this space, because it has to be technically deep and musically natural at the same time. It has to hold an enormous amount of detail under the hood while feeling effortless to use on top. That combination, complexity in service of something that feels simple and inspiring, is exactly the kind of challenge that gets us excited. Drum libraries are going to be a big part of what we build, and getting them right is worth every bit of the effort.

We’re huge fans of hardware modeling. Some of the most impressive work in our whole field comes from companies who set out to recreate a classic piece of gear and absolutely nail it. Universal Audio, Solid State Logic modeling their own consoles, Empirical Labs putting the Distressor in a plugin, Kazrog capturing the transformers inside legendary preamps. These are the plugins we open every day, and a lot of them end up in our own work. The accuracy is genuinely a marvel, and we have nothing but respect for the people chasing it.

Our own interest sits in a slightly different spot. We love modeling hardware too, but for us it tends to be the starting point rather than the destination.

We’re less focused on recreating a unit down to the last detail, and more interested in capturing the character that makes it special, then seeing what we can build from there.

What hardware modeling actually involves

Most people picture modeling as test tones. You send sine sweeps through a unit, measure what comes back, and build a profile from the numbers. That part is real, and it matters. On its own, though, it tends to give you something accurate and a little flat.

The other half is running real music through the hardware. Not sweeps, but DI guitars, drums, distorted guitars, vocals, bass, and full mixes. You send actual program material into a unit and listen to how it reacts, because hardware doesn’t behave the same way with a sine wave as it does with a snare hit or a wall of guitars. You also capture it across its whole range rather than at a single setting. Every knob position behaves a little differently, so you map the behavior of each control instead of taking one snapshot and calling it done. Then you bring all of it together into something that moves and responds the way the original does.

That difference is the whole point. A unit’s character doesn’t live in its frequency response alone. It lives in how it reacts to a real performance, in the harmonics it adds when you push it, in the way it grabs a transient. You only really catch that by feeding it the kind of audio it was built to shape.

Character as a starting point

Here’s how we think about it. The companies making flawless clones have that covered, and they do it beautifully. What excites us is taking the character we capture and using it as raw material.

The hardware becomes a source of inspiration, a set of ingredients we can pull from, rather than a finish line.

So far we’ve modeled a handful of units we love, along with a couple of amps, and the captures sound genuinely exciting to us. The part we look forward to most is the question that comes after the capture, which is where this character belongs and what it could become. That’s the creative part, and it’s the reason we got into this in the first place.

Here’s a feeling a lot of producers know. You love a particular drive from one pedal or plugin. You love a specific modulation from another. And what you actually want, in this song, right now, is the first feeding into the second, without the dozen other features either one came with. So you build a little chain, patch it together, and make it work. It sounds great. It’s also a few plugins deep for what is really one idea.

That small moment is one of the most creative places in all of music production, and it’s where a lot of our thinking lives.

Why chains stack up

Most gear is designed to be complete. A pedal or a plugin is built to be a full product with a full set of controls, so it can stand on its own. That makes total sense. It’s just not always the shape you need.

Often you want one specific thing a unit does, combined with one specific thing something else does, and to get there you end up stacking several plugins to use a small slice of each.

There’s also a practical cost to that. Every plugin in the chain adds CPU, and a few high-quality processors stacked up to achieve one sound can get heavy fast, especially across a full session with that chain on multiple tracks. Anyone who has watched their CPU meter climb while building an elaborate effect chain knows the feeling.

When you find yourself reaching for several tools to get one result, that’s worth noticing.

It often means the tool you actually want, the one that does that exact thing in a single efficient package, simply hasn’t been built yet.

Recombination as a creative act

This is the heart of how we think about building. Take the drive character you love from one source. Take the movement you love from another. Leave out everything you do not need. Then bring what is left together into a single, focused tool that does exactly the job you kept reaching for.

Crossbreeding, in the most literal sense, taking the best traits of different things and combining them into something new.

It’s worth saying that this is not a new idea. The Distressor itself came from its creator taking what he loved about several classic compressors around him and combining those qualities into one unit. We find that approach genuinely inspiring.

It’s worth being honest about where we are. We’re not announcing a shelf of finished products. We’re sharing how we think and what we’re excited to explore.

We’ve been capturing the character of gear we love precisely so we have a palette to draw from. The question in front of us now is the best kind of question, which is this: given all these characteristics we’ve gathered, what is worth building, and what real need should it serve? That’s the work we get to do next, and we’re genuinely looking forward to it.

Compression is the effect most people understand last, even though they use it first. The controls feel abstract until you hear them on the right source, and there is no better teacher than drums. Drums are loud, punchy, and full of transients, so every move a compressor makes is obvious on them. If you want to really learn what these knobs do, put them on a drum kit and listen.

The four controls that matter

Threshold sets the level where compression kicks in. Ratio sets how hard it clamps down once it does. Those two decide how much. The two that decide how it feels are attack and release.

Attack is how quickly the compressor reacts once the signal crosses the threshold, and on drums it changes everything. A fast attack grabs the very front of a hit and tames it, which can make a kit sound smaller and more controlled. A slower attack lets the initial smack of the drum through before the compressor clamps down, so you keep the punch and only shape what comes after.

That single choice is the difference between a flat kit and one that hits you in the chest.

Release is how quickly it lets go, and it does more than you might expect. Set the release fast and the compressor recovers between hits, which lets the natural resonance and sustain of the shells come back into the sound, so the kit breathes and rings the way a real kit does. Set it too slow and the compressor never quite lets go, which can choke that resonance and flatten the life out of the drums. Release is really a sustain control in disguise.

Parallel compression, the drummer's secret weapon

Here’s the technique that makes all of this click. Instead of compressing your drums directly, you send a copy to a separate channel and absolutely crush it. Fast attack, high ratio, ten or more decibels of gain reduction, the kind of setting that sounds broken when you solo it. Then you blend that crushed copy quietly underneath the untouched drums. Experimentation is key here.

The dry drums keep their natural attack and dynamics. The smashed copy adds weight, density, and sustain underneath. You get punch and power at the same time, which direct compression alone struggles to give you. It’s one of the most reliable moves in any genre, and it teaches you to actually hear what extreme compression does.

Overheads, rooms, and glue

Compression on the wider drum sources is where character really shows up. On overheads, a gentle touch can pull the cymbals and the overall kit picture together without smearing the transients, while a heavier hand brings up the sense of a real space.

Room mics are where you can have fun and get aggressive. Crushing a room track hard and blending it in is one of the classic ways to make drums sound huge and alive, which is exactly what the Distressor’s famous Nuke mode was built to do on live room mics.

Then there’s the mix bus or the drum bus, where the legendary SSL G-Series bus compressor earns its reputation. Strapped across a mix, it makes everything sound bigger and more cohesive, the effect everyone calls glue, and SSL’s own plugin version of it is one of the best in the box. A classic starting point is a gentle 2:1 or 4:1 ratio with only a couple of decibels of gain reduction, letting it pull the whole picture together.

The part that shapes how we build

Spend enough time doing this and you notice something. The compressors people reach for are not chosen only for how cleanly they control dynamics. They’re chosen for the color and texture they add while they work. A certain style of compressor grabs fast and leaves a pleasing harmonic edge behind, and that edge is half the reason it sounds good. The Distressor is a perfect example. Its creator built it by taking what he loved about the classic compressors around him and combining those qualities into something with a character all its own.

That idea is exactly why, when we model a compressor, we care as much about its character as its curve. Controlling dynamics is the easy part to measure. The way a unit colors a drum while it clamps down is the hard part, and the part worth capturing.

The character is not a side effect. It’s what makes a compressor worth reaching for.

The short answer is harmonics. Here is the longer one.

Saturation is one of those words that gets used constantly and explained rarely. People reach for it when a mix feels too clean, too digital, too flat. They add a little, and suddenly things sound warmer and more real.

But warmth is not magic. It’s harmonics, and once you understand what’s actually happening, you can use saturation on purpose, along with your ears, instead of relying on feel alone.

Feel still matters most. It just works a lot better when you also know what the effect is doing.

What saturation actually does to a signal

When you saturate a signal, you’re gently distorting it. Not the obvious kind that turns a clean guitar into a wall of fuzz, but a subtle version that adds new frequency content that was not there before. Those new frequencies are harmonics, mathematically related to the original sound, and our ears read them as richness. The same process softly rounds off the loudest peaks, which is why saturated audio often feels a little more controlled and a little more glued together.

That’s the secret behind the word analog. Analog hardware couldn’t help adding harmonics and gently clipping peaks, and that coloration is a big part of why so many records people love sound the way they do. So when a digital signal feels sterile, what it’s usually missing is exactly that harmonic content. Add it back tastefully and the sound feels like it passed through something real. This is also why transformer plugins like Kazrog True Iron, or the saturation modes built into compressors like FabFilter Pro-C, can make a flat track suddenly feel alive. They’re adding harmonic life, not just volume.

Where saturation earns its place in a mix

A few examples come up constantly. A touch of saturation on a bass guitar generates harmonics higher up the spectrum, which is how a bass can stay felt in the low end while still being clearly heard on phones and laptops that can’t reproduce the fundamental at all. On a drum bus, parallel saturation brings out the body of a snare and gives cymbals more weight without you having to push the level. On a vocal, a small amount of drive adds presence and that slightly forward quality, and because saturation softly tames peaks, it sometimes does the job you were about to hand to a second compressor.

The thread running through all of it is that saturation is rarely about making something sound distorted. It’s about adding the harmonic life that makes a sound feel finished.

Why this matters to us

Harmonics are the bridge between digital and analog, and that’s not a throwaway line for us. It’s the reason we model hardware the way we do. The character we want to capture lives in this harmonic behavior, in how a unit colors a signal while it works. Once you hear that harmonic content is what makes great gear sound great, you understand why we spend our time chasing character. Harmonics are a huge part of why certain sounds feel alive to us.

Bass does a lot of heavy lifting in a mix. It’s the foundation that makes guitars feel thick, locks the low end to the drums, and turns a pile of tracks into something with real weight. It’s also one of the most satisfying things to get right, because when the bass settles into place, the whole mix tends to come together with it.

Clean lows, dirty highs

One of the most useful ideas in bass mixing is to stop treating the bass as a single sound. Split it.

One layer stays clean and owns the low end. The other gets distorted and owns the grit and definition up top.

A common way to do it is to duplicate the bass, filter the low frequencies off one of the copies, and drive that copy with distortion. Now you have a clean track holding down the fundamental and a dirty track adding harmonics and bite. Blend them to taste. The distortion is not there to sound distorted. It generates harmonic content higher up the spectrum, which is how bass cuts through a dense mix and stays audible on phones and laptops that can’t reproduce the lows at all. Even on softer material, a little grit is a great way to add presence.

Getting the kick and bass to dance

Here’s a technique that goes a step past the usual advice. The kick and bass tend to fight for the same low frequency space. The standard fix is to duck the bass whenever the kick hits. That works, but ducking the entire bass can feel blunt, like the whole instrument flinches every time the kick lands.

A more controlled approach is to treat the very low end of each instrument as its own moving piece. Using multiband compression, you focus specifically on the low frequency band of the bass and the low frequency band of the kick, shaping how each one reacts over time. The bass low end is set to compress faster, so it steps out of the way quickly. The kick low end is set to respond more slowly, so its punch leads the movement.

The result is that the kick swings through first and the bass low end follows right behind it, almost like the follow through of a golf swing.

The two stop colliding and start moving in sequence instead.

The bass also stays mostly intact, because only the range where the conflict actually lives, way down low, is being shaped. The mids and upper harmonics of the bass stay stable, so the instrument keeps its presence and aggression while the low end becomes cleaner and more controlled.

A great tool for this is the Waves C4 multiband compressor. You can isolate the low band, set its crossover point, and dial in threshold, attack, and release independently for each source, which is exactly the kind of control this technique needs.

Why this kind of problem is fun

This is the sort of puzzle we love. You hit a wall in a real mix, the kick and bass refuse to coexist, and you work out a clever way to make them share the space. Moments like that, where a specific problem leads to a specific solution, are a big part of where our ideas come from and a big part of why we enjoy this work in the first place.