Why We Do The Things We Do...

The fifty-odd comments in the previous post (as of this writing), coupled with the fifty more in the thread before that left me with the nagging feeling that there might be a fundamental lack of understanding about how Audio Damage does business. So I thought I’d lay out what is, for all intents and purposes, our “mission statement.” This is, in effect, why we do the things we do.

Our goal is to make creating music more interesting. Not easier. Be sure you read that right. The path of least resistance in the creation of music leads to wedding bands, and we simply won’t be party to that. That’s the reason we do some things which may seem stupid/ignorant/downright mean. Sure, it would be easy to add a mix control on to Rough Rider. It would take us all of ten minutes (discounting re-doing the design, which would take several hours.) But it would change the effect drastically, and belittle its intended purpose. There are compressors out there with crudely hacked sidechain functionality and mix controls. If you think you need that stuff, go right ahead and get one of those. We’re not even slightly suggesting that you shouldn’t. Rough Rider isn’t a compressor with a small “c.” It’s an Audio Damage Compressor, with a big C.

I’m not just the hair club president. I’m also a client. Another deciding factor in most of our designs is the fact that I’ve spent a lot of time in the studio. I know from having to labor through somewhere between eighty and a hundred commercial releases (truthfully, I’ve completely lost count) that some things are dumb and other things are cool. This heavily informs all of our designs. One thing I’ve learned in exactly two decades of making music professionally is that the clean boxes that have everything are the ones used the least. We stick a ton of filters and saturation in our effects, we limit the ranges of the controls on purpose, and we leave out what may seem like obvious features, in order to ensure that each and every product we release is an individual instrument that has a sound to it.

Business as unusual. One thing that we receive a lot of complaints about is our no demo policy. We often get letters that say “no demo, no purchase.” That’s fine, of course. One I got yesterday, the guy was actually pissed at us, as far as I can tell. I don’t think I could have read it any other way. I’d hasten to point out two things: (a) Audio Damage is quite successful, which leads us to believe that our way is just as good as any other way, and (b) we ain’t the only frog in this pond. If you won’t buy a plug-in without a demo, there are plenty of companies out there that would be more than happy to let you demo their software. We ain’t one of them. Of course, they don’t make Dubstation or Replicant, so there’s that to consider, I guess. In any event, our business practices, including our rabid and somewhat irrational hatred of RTAS and DigiDesign, are balanced by the fact that we, alone of all commercial plug-in developers, offer a no-questions-asked money back guarantee, a three month exchange policy, and perhaps the most liberal license control in the business. Let me put that another way so it makes sense: if you buy an Audio Damage product, you can turn around and sell that same product years later for almost the same money. Try that with a Waves license you bought at Guitar Center in 2004.

And that would be that… Ultimately, it comes down to this: we get some things wrong (Mayhem and Ronin), we get some things right (Replicant and Dubstation), and we hit some down the middle. We design effects the way we design them, we accept the kindnesses and criticisms, and hope to do better the next time. We don’t make delays. We make Audio Damage Delays. We don’t make glitch effects. We make Audio Damage Glitch Effects. We don’t make plugins. We make Audio Damage Plug-ins. If we leave out the tempo sync, it’s because we want to know that’s Liquid in the mix. If we don’t put in a wet/dry mix, it’s to help you think of new ways to do things. If we only put four filter topologies in there, it’s because they’re four good ones, instead of fifty mediocre ones. Our goal is not to help you make music. It’s to help you make music better.

And since nobody managed to put two and two together, even though I outright said it in this thread, Rough Rider will be free.