Ernst Nathorst-Boos and Marcus Zetterquist, along with Peter "Pelle" Jubel, founded Propellerhead Software in 1994. Propellerhead, based in Stockholm Sweden, has given us some unique software for audio creation and production, like Reason, ReBirth and ReCycle, and have now introduced Record, their own take on DAW software.
I know there are three of you that are partners, right? Peter is not with us today.
Ernst: Yes. He's not a trade show person.
Marcus: No, he's not.
E: He's our signal processing engineer, and he's sort of a special guy. He likes being in his lab. He is very comfortable there. But he is a magician.
I think he must be.
E: And if you look at what we've done in terms of the SSL emulation, the time stretch that's in Record and the synthesizers in recent programs — almost all of that is his work. I don't know how to describe it. He just hears something and understands how to write the code to make it sound like that. We don't know where we would be without him.
Your first product was ReCycle in 1994. What was the impetus behind that product?
E: Marcus and I had gotten together a few years earlier and done an even smaller project together, and we wanted to do a real musical application. This was the time when people really started working with sample fragments — not just the kick drum or the snare, but complete loops. We did look at the market and say, "It seems like something is happening here." But the more important part was that we looked at the process of how people do this stuff. You have something on vinyl — before you've got everything hooked up, sampled in and trimmed up, you don't even know if it's going to fit your song. So 45 minutes later you go, "No, that loop didn't work. Let me try another one." We said, "Can we do something here that changes the workflow or the potential of this thing that's happening? Can we use a computer to change it?"
M: I think the normal thing to do was that you had a loop at a certain BPM, and then you pitched it or you changed a song to fit it. People didn't think about chopping them up at that point.
E: Time stretch barely existed.
M: In keyboard magazines there were all these loop CDs. We would order CDs with loops on them, and there was no clear way to use them.
So this would be an editing program to help you make your own samples and use loops and samples?
E: Yes, that was the idea.
What products came after that?
E: For us the next thing was ReBirth.
That was an emulator of the Roland Bass Line synth?
E: Right, the TB-303 Bass Line. That's what we thought we had done — a good emulator, right? But I think ReBirth was actually the first program that allowed people without deep musical knowledge to use a computer and make music that sounded authentic. Another thing was that they could share their creations. Everybody had the same piece of software and the same capabilities on their computer, so you could download somebody's track and maybe just listen to it or make changes to it and upload it again. Suddenly people were sharing songs and forming bands on the Internet. I think it was the first time that actually happened. It was possible because it was a self-contained format.
M: They were small [files].
The REX file was used for ReCycle no? Other programs have taken that on.
E: Originally you had the stuff transmitted over to samplers, so you had your thing connected by MIDI or SCSI. Then people started using software. We understood that you needed to deploy your work into a software program. We had to have a file format, so we built something.
M: It used to be a RCY file. It was basically an AIFF file that we used as a save format for the program. Later on we added more processing to more features, so we had to stretch things some. So we did the REX file format. At that point we wanted other companies to be able to use it, and it was really tricky to replicate the stretching.
Where did the company go from there? Was that what led into Reason?
E: If you look at some of the prototypes for ReBirth, they look a little bit more like Reason than ReBirth. Reason was sort of the application that we wanted to do, but we didn't have the resources. Computers weren't fast enough.
M: We needed to do something fast as well, because we were taking a chance.
E: We were running out of money. We had to get something out really quickly. Reason was launched in 2000. That's also when we took a step from licensing our stuff through Steinberg and we became the company that we are today. Reason 1.0 was done over 18 months. I can't imagine how we pulled that off. We were younger then, right? That was the biggest thing we had done.
Was that hinging on general computer processing and speed being up to par for what you wanted to achieve?
E: And also that the drivers for sound cards were getting to a point where you could play in real time and have a response that was sensible.
M: We designed ReBirth so we could get synthesis on a computer, but the latency when you played was too slow. We designed ReBirth to not require that. That's why it has a built-in sequencer. At that time on a PC, you had 200 milliseconds of latency on the keyboard, so you couldn't really play it. So we designed a product around the limitation.
E: We actually debated whether Reason was going to have its own sequencer or not, because the main part of it was the rack of stuff. We built a rack of stuff for other sequencers because this was before all those virtual instruments.
M: But then we figured that we had this thing with ReBirth where people were sharing songs, so we put the sequencer in. We didn't really think that a lot of people would take to it and make it their main compositional tool. That was a big surprise for us, when people started just using the program. Even to this day we have a large number of people where Reason is the only thing they use to make music, even though it doesn't have audio recording.
That kind of leads us to where you're at now with Record. It's a real big jump for you guys to go into the DAW recording field.
E: We wanted to do this for a long time. It just took us longer than we had expected. We've done updates of Reason, we've done other projects, but it was now the time to do this.
M: We felt that we had new stuff to bring to the table that other companies didn't.
E: If there's a thread in what we're doing, it's that we want to try to take technology that's either very expensive or very complicated to use and reserved for a few people and put it into the hands of anybody who's got the persistence and talent to do cool stuff with it. That's the same with Record — we looked at a lot of the stuff coming from two angles. One is, "What do we think we really can improve workflow-wise, compared to what's happening in other applications?" It's a million things, but it's just little things. In our program, when you hit "New Document," you do not get a dialog that asks you about format depths or bit resolutions, because that's not how musicians work. You just want a blank canvas to start working on. That's just one example out of a lot of them where we just tried to do away with everything that doesn't have anything to do with making music — we just tried to get people directly into what it is they actually wanted to do when they sat down in front of the computer.
M: When we designed the program, we were counting the number of mouse clicks during installation — how many mouse clicks until you get something working.
So you're looking at other people's programs and going, "That's what we don't want."
M: We tried to remove a lot of the steps in between.
E: There is a lot of background technology to do some of those things that I just mentioned, and up front there is also stuff where we'd say, "We all want to record in this million-dollar studio type of environment. What can we put in to give that kind of feeling?" It's about the desk, it's about the guitar amps — all of that stuff goes in there. It's sort of two different things happening at the same time, but the basic idea is just to help people make as much music as possible and sound as good as they possibly can.
And this fully integrates with Reason and ReBirth?
E: Actually only Reason. ReBirth is discontinued. But you can use them together. It actually becomes like one application. If you are familiar with Reason, there's basically no pain involved in stepping up to Record. It feels like it appears inside your Reason.
One of the features of Reason that you're known for is having effects and processors. You've brought that over to Record, but you don't have access to plug-ins from other companies.
E: Correct.
Processor efficiency is obviously one of the answers, right?
E: There are a lot of answers, and that's important. Stability is another. I'm going to stick my neck out here and say our programs don't crash. We really try to make things work, both in the ways of workflow and having the right feature set and everything, and how things are working together, but also in terms of quality and stability and the code. We just want to try another approach where we provide a lot of good instruments — drum machines, samplers, loop players, great reverbs and other effects. We think that there is an advantage to having that set of instruments that we provide. It gives you a different type of workflow. It allows you to concentrate on what you're doing. There are some things with plug-ins that we think are just wrong.
With other people's plug-ins?
E: No, it's not that. It's just the format. Say you want a piano sound. In a typical system, what is the first decision you need to make? It is, "What plug-in?" That's not right. You wanted a piano sound. I didn't say if it was going to be a synthesized piano, a sample piano, electric piano — you want to mess around and see what works on your track. That's just one thing. If the focus is really about making a song, making a track, laying down as much music [as you can], trying out musical ideas, then there are some aspects of plug-ins that are wonderful, and there are some that really get in the way. We totally recognize the fact that everything is not in our program. People will want to do mixing or special stuff in other applications. We've made a lot of revisions for that. There is ReWire, so you can hook it into Pro Tools or whatever you're using. There are also ways to export all the tracks all at once in stems, and then you can import them into another program and do mixing there.
I know that Record saves sessions as a singular file, but can you export it as regular WAV or AIFF tracks?
E: Yeah. Also, if you want to collaborate with someone, try doing that on a plug-in system.
What's been the response so far from users of Record?
E: You can go into our forums and look at magazine reviews and see that it's been overwhelmingly positive.
What do you have planned in the future?
E: Record is at 1.0. Reason is at Version 4, working on Version 5. That's actually a little bit harder to find the right spot. Who wants another version of Microsoft Word? That's just scary — it's just more buttons and stuff. We already have an application that's been out for a while. You have to be careful what you do so you don't put stuff in that gets in the way of good stuff you already have.
I assume that updates and future-proofing software to new operating systems is all part of the game, too.
E: Yes. I usually say that we've got these four energy levels, if you will. If we don't do anything, our products stop working because Microsoft and Apple bring out a new OS. That's a lot of work — maintaining it. Then we have smaller feature updates of stuff you need to add because people are asking for them. Then the next one is bigger strategic features that you want to add to an application. Those may take several updates before you realize the idea that you had at the beginning. The fourth level is actually doing more products, not just Reason or Record. Then reality tries to pull you down to the first two levels all the time. It's a lot of prioritization. The hard part for us is not coming up with new ideas, because we've got an incredible inflow from everywhere about ideas. The hard part is selecting out of those 300 the 12 that you can actually do. For some companies it's business as usual that things crash and fixes come out. It's a little sad that the world acts as if it's business as usual and they have to accept that.
E: We worked on this program for a long time and we released it in September. We haven't issued any bug releases because it's actually working.
That's kind of unheard of, isn't it? [laughter]
E: It is and that's unfortunate. If we can do it, other companies can do it to. If they're not doing it, it's because we think they're not getting their priorities right. There are hard-working people out there that sit all day in front of that computer, and it just shouldn't crash.
