The Sonic Revolution of Oeksound

Jakob Wredstrøm

I am happy to call Hannes Andersson my friend, but he's also super inspiring and successful. OX SOUND is a Finnish plug-in company that has taken the world with storm. They are super, super popular. This is going to be an interesting episode. So Hannes, welcome to Sound Connections. Thank you. I've been looking forward to this episode. Hannes, you and I, we are friends. But I'm also a big fan of your professional career. And that's why you're here today, not just because you're your friend. But we've known each other for, I would say, six years time or something like that. Yeah. I think it's six years. Yeah, because my relationship with you comes, first and foremost, from a creative side. So you are and was a songwriter when I met you, and I also focused a lot on that. And we've both slowly but surely ventured to the creative side, more and more into business, even though we still kept a lot of creative things. But Hannes, who are you? Can you tell a bit about yourself and your journey into business? Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. My name is Hannes Andersson. I'm from Finland, from Helsinki. And yeah, throughout my life, I've been many things within the music industry. I've been a recording engineer, mixing engineer, musician, studied classical piano for a long time and went to study music technology, picked up recording and mixing, production, started producing bands, artists and my own music. And pretty much at university I went through this bucket list of just... checking off everything I wanted to do as an engineer producer in music. And I got to do that thanks to my school. So anything from like recording symphony orchestras, big bands, mixing, prog metal, producing electronic music, so much different things that university enabled me to do. But while studying there, I met...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Olli Keskinen who is the founder of OXSound, which is a plugin company. And during his time at the university, he then came up with the idea behind the first product for the first plugin that he later then released. And so through, it was also through university that I started suddenly being a part of a plugging company and now my role there is mainly operations. So I think you can, the title I would go by as COO at the moment, but we're a very small company and very flexible in our roles as well. But yeah, so coming from a music production side, coming and then leaning more into the software side but still in music. It's very interesting you say like a small company because while that might be true, like OX Sound is, in my opinion, one of the most legendary plugging companies in the world right now within audio production. And if you just look at the people who's using your videos and look at Janko Patrick being fronting your products, it's some pretty amazing things you guys have done. But for listeners who don't know about OX Sound or audio production in general, could you just explain a bit? about what you do and what is it that is so special about your products? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, plugins is, like audio plugins is a very, very niche kind of business and a very niche market, I would say. So within music production and within music, recording music and audio in general, broadcast, sound design, audio for film, We use software to record and edit and mix a process. And we can use digital audio workstation, DAWs like Pro Tools, Ableton, Premiere, many different things depending on like what kind of music and what kind of stuff you're using. Now, think about them as browsers. Now within browsers, you can use plugins to get further, to get more use out of

Jakob Wredstrøm

what browser you're using. So within a DAW, within Pro Tools, for example, you can use plugins to get more functionality. And you can buy these plugins to get more functionality out of your DAW. And usually DAWs come with their stock plugins. You've got your equalizers, you've got your compressors, you've got your maybe a noise suppressor of some sort, you've got limiters and different dynamic processors, different modulating processors and effects and creative effects and stuff like that. So what we made was something that did not exist within those stock plugins inside of DOS. And there are many, of course, plugging companies that also do that, do different tools that don't exist in your stock kind of toolkit when you buy a digital audio So, but I think what we then did with our products was so unique that it kind of, we got a lot of attention fast in the market. Because I remember first time I tried Soothe, and I think that was, you know, we met in the early days of Soothe, you and me, and I was completely mind blown because I also have an audio engineer background and I have a Now I'm not as updated, but at that time I had a very thorough understanding of what was going on. So in the episode in general, we're going to talk about OX sound, we're going to talk about you, but also with really trying to understand what happened with OX sound and what's happening, because again, it's a podcast about founders, it's a podcast about entrepreneurship within the music industry. And I think there's a lot of things to be learned from OX sound and what you guys have done. So, okay. You have this amazing product. that the founders made. And then what happened there? He just put it up on a website? Like what was the story there? Yeah, yeah. So I knew Olli from before, Olli Kesken and the founder and the creator of the first version of Soothe. I knew him from studying. And during that time, the way he tells it is that

Jakob Wredstrøm

Well, he has a background in programming, and he had already been programming stuff for, since he was, I don't know, 10, 11, and was very interested in computer games and other similar things. And then studying music technology, you kind of, you encounter these problems that take up a lot of your time as an engineer. And... classic one is when using equalizers and trying to balance a sound, there was this thing that I think most engineers do and that's suppressing annoying or harsh frequencies in your audio signal. And that is kind of like depending on how complex the signaling is, that could be very much kind of a manual labor. And he had also heard that pro mixing engineers, when for example mixing a lead vocal, so like the main vocal track on a pop song for example, that they would go through syllables or they would go through a vocal syllable by syllable and actually EQ out resonant frequencies from every syllable. Now he heard that and was like, also felt the need of doing that when recording, especially when recording with cheaper microphones in not treated rooms with cheap equipment in general, maybe not the best players, singers. And so the idea, I think, came from him being just thinking, well, with the technology available, there should be an algorithm that could do that for the user, or at least know what to suppress, and then let the user decide how much suppression should happen. And I think something like three years later, the first version of Soothe was out. I can't speak with 100% certainty, of course, because there might be different things happening along that.

Jakob Wredstrøm

along that route, but also the plugin business being what it is, you can create, and it being kind of e-commerce in a sense, you create a product, you don't sell the plugin, you sell the license to use the plugin. And so you sell that online on your own web shop that you obviously can put up yourself. So he made the plugin, made the licensing, the first licensing system that we had, made that himself, made the website, made the web shop. And then just put it out there, wrote a blog post on Gearspace that was called something different back then. And from that point, it just started to spread because the best thing about the plugin industry is that we can't shut up about plugins. People love talking about plugins. And that's. we're very lucky that's the case because people want to know what's the latest tool. Because it's audio and because it's not understandable as immediately as, for example, a visual tool. It kind of feels like magic when you use it first time. So, yeah. There are obviously a lot of different, I can go into the technical aspects of it, like what the technology we're using, what it's based upon or what kind of like next steps were. But yeah, I jumped on pretty much immediately after he had released the first version of Soothe because he was fixing bugs and stuff, the normal things that happen when you release software, especially your first software. And

Jakob Wredstrøm

He needed someone that could kind of maybe market the product, like in a basic sense. And after two conversations, he just asked like, why don't you try of me? And I did not really have like, and that was not something I had in mind even. But then I like a challenge. And I, I'm like me working for a plugging company was definitely kind of something that I would love to do and that I still love to do. So it was kind of, yeah, it just, I was at the right place at the right time and I had a lot of passion for figuring that out and but not really an education in that sense other than I do use, I still use plugins every day and I know the market probably like better than most. So I guess in that sense, yeah, I knew the market, but kind of like my marketing background, it was not that. Because I think that's really interesting stories to deep dive into, like, what happened with the business? Like, what kind of people joined? What do you guys do to grow? Because when I met you, I think it just started in OXound. It was sort of like a side thing. It's like, oh, this is really freaking cool. Plugin company. And then it just... grew and grew and grew, not like super, super fast, but like it did grow quite fast. So what did you guys do as a company? Like what was your strategy, what happened? Yeah. Yeah, it would be nice if I could say that we had a strategy. But I think it's much more simpler than that when you put a bunch of freelancers together. So. Yeah, just to kind of get up to a point where it felt like we had everything running. We released Soothe in November 2016, or Oli released Soothe in November 2016. I joined maybe four months, four or five months later. And then we quickly...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Joined forces with Tommy Grön, or he had already helped out, helped Oli with some consulting and stuff like that. And he was also very much into developing plugins. And so he was the first one to join as well. As a programmer, or what was his role? As a developer and programmer, yeah. And this type of program would be called a DSP programmer. So somebody that programs digital signal processing, which is like the core when processing audio or developing audio processors. And another like extremely valuable addition was customer support. And that was Joel Ward. And I won't go through everyone that's at OXSANET because I would definitely miss one and that would be horrible. And then, but yeah, but I think the main, now looking back and also speaking to other plugging companies, shielding the ones creating the IP or creating the technology from the outside noise is extremely valuable. Like only letting through the. communication and the information that actually makes sense, that actually holds value, the feedback that holds value, the constructive criticism or the constructive feedback, like letting that through, but keeping everything else at bay is super important for innovation to continue happening because that would, like that can stop innovation happening altogether. So... We had someone put in on customer support pretty early, like handling communication. And then we grew, added more developers. We kind of did this switch where Olli, Tommy and me became partners in a new version of OX sound. And that was after we had released our second plugin. Yeah. And then...

Jakob Wredstrøm

What happened was that at the beginning of 2020, we released the second version of Soothe and that we had improved upon that a lot. And we all know what happened in 2020. We released it, we had a great release campaign, the pandemic hit, everybody was at home, had nothing better to do than to watch YouTube videos about plugins and learn about the new tool called Soothe 2. So... that kind of like really, really hushed our popularity in the space. I'm just going to stop you for a moment because this is a really exciting part of the journey. So I just want to come back to that just in a moment because you said something two minutes back, which was really, really interesting. I just want to circle to. So you said shielding the founder or shielding the creative from the outside world. I'm paraphrasing, but that's sort of what you said. That's a really interesting discussion. Of course, something that talks about creative entrepreneurs building companies. That's something that's a really cool aspect. Could you deep dive for me what you meant by that? Yeah, so.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I've been talking with other founders in the space and I see that they're stressed. I see that there's something weighing on them. And usually when two people from plugging companies talk to each other, I mean, you usually get to hear kind of like what's weighing on their chest because they kind of like what they want. to hear how you've handled it or they want affirmation or confirmation about their thoughts maybe. And I think there was some founders that talked about some bugs that they had received or like the critique that they've got like hate for like a feature or something, some small, there was like one user somewhere saying something bad about something they had done or maybe just getting, or Maybe they had just, I don't know, it felt like something that, we don't see that a lot, but even like getting one of those messages once every second month or something like that can affect the creative space. We're still... doing, creating innovative products or creating innovative plugins or stuff like that. It is a creative process in the end. And whenever you let the outside world in and kind of like poke you with their critique of why do you do this way? I want you to do it this way. That's gonna stop your creative flow. It's very similar to songwriting in a sense. And that's what I've seen and that's what I've seen happen. So having someone in between that can first off answer these.

Jakob Wredstrøm

This critique and this feedback in a polite manner with integrity and with something that resonates with the company's values. Obviously, you need good people in this position. And it still has a very streamlined channel open to the developers or to the founders or to whoever. But the one that can filter out that bull shit in happening. so that you leave the developers alone to be creative and to actually solve problems. I think this is so interesting. And just to comment on, like, when you speaking about this, you're not just speaking as an academic, you're a songwriter yourself, and in my opinion, one of the most brilliant songwriters I know. And especially, yeah, well, and also you're just extremely knowledgeable about creativity in general. For me personally, and once in a while in this podcast I talk about myself, like I am an extremely creative individual. And when I used to be a songwriter, what I did is I opened up completely. Like I'm a super emotional human being, but people who don't know me wouldn't necessarily know that, because I'm either or, if that makes sense. Because when I'm in my creative space, I can get so hurt, and I can get so vulnerable, that I can't really allow people to venture into that space. So we've even had rules when I present new ideas in the company, if it's something that's fragile, they're not allowed to critique it. Like if I present you an idea, just listen. I don't need you to give feedback. Maybe you're welcome if you can say, oh, that sounds cool or something like that. But there's no critique allowed because that creative space can be so vulnerable. And maybe it's crap, but give it the time and thought and patience to show whether or not it's good or not. And that volume of space can't really be messed with. But I haven't really heard it addressed so much on a company level. So I think that's really, really interesting. Yeah, fragility is a very interesting topic in teams and in companies in general. And I think something that we don't allow very easily in teams. And we can't allow each other to be fragile. We can't allow each other to be emotional in a...

Jakob Wredstrøm

In a space with other people, which I think obviously is bullshit. And because all the creativity comes from thinking differently, and the innovation comes from thinking differently. I mean, think different, which company has that as their motto. And If we don't open up the space to allow that, or if we kind of we know from the get-go that if I speak my mind, I will be met with critique and this will be pushed down and then I will go home and feel bad about it, then we're not going to get more innovation. We're not going to get better ideas. Yeah. going to get more of the same ideas. We're going to get more of what everybody else is doing. That's not innovation. Wow. I think especially within the music industry, most founders, entrepreneurs, or music industry professionals venturing into this space have the tendency of being in the music industry for a reason. A lot of it has to do with that you're inherently creative or you think a bit differently or your emotions resonate with different things than most normal And therefore, I would assume, at least that's my experience, that people are also more vulnerable to some extent than most other industries. So I think especially this talk about protecting the founder, protecting the developers, which is the odd system, this example, I think is just really interesting. And I think it's also interesting as a founder myself, what's happening in Capella is we've grown faster than we expected. And we're a fairly large team now. And... What has happened is I have been involved in almost every single activity we're doing and that's not very good. So what's happening now is we've put in a general manager who is basically operating my role, like the things that we're executing, taking over operations for that. But it also gives me the freedom to not be in the fire all the time, that I can actually pull back, see things from a perspective, be creative.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And then bring these perspectives that I'm good at because I'm good at seeing things from a different perspective or bringing new ideas to the table or understanding the more like undefinable aspects of something. But when does this happen? Because obviously as a founder, when you start a company, that's not something that you're just default to. Like when in the process did this happen where you were able to do this protection and after events so that we can go back to the pandemic and everything? That happened pretty fast in our case. I think one thing we haven't even touched upon is that OX sound from the beginning we've never been a startup. Like if we've never tried to acquire funding. I think since OLA released the product, it was profitable within our seven or something like that. So. Like again, obviously you can't think about it that way because there's three years of work behind it. But going forward, like actually the upkeep of the license system and the webshop is not that big. So he could add more people to support him from the beginning and knowing that he could pay also like have people on a payroll. So it usually got added by... kind of like an hourly basis of, I did three hours of emails this week or like this month or something like that. And very, very lean way of just adding resources when you need it. Obviously, and that's something that I then, when jumping on as well, struggled a lot is to kind of like, you have this possibility now because of the resources. To do everything. So what should you do? You can start all these social media channels. You can buy ad space in all these areas. But what does actually matter? And then just do small things at a time. So one thing that was very key was obviously customer support and communications like that. That needed to be in place. It needed to feel.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Like you spoke directly with the company. So we needed to be like a friend of ours, for example. And going forward, we just, the first people that got added was somebody that somebody knew that kind of had the skillset that we needed. So in 2020, we were six or seven people, or maybe eight, depending on how you count. And we have people like step in when we needed them. My sister helped me with digital. Digital ads, like Facebook ads and Google ads, right during the golden era of Facebook ads and golden and like Google ads when they, you know, stole all your information and knew exactly everything you were doing. And so kind of definitely we used that to our advantage during that time. And Yeah, so going and then going forward, I think now we're maybe 16 people, depending again, depending on how you count. And yeah, it's been a it's been a kind of crazy journey getting here. But as to answer your question, I think, yeah, we always had the possibility to make small steps towards.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Adding, for example, customer support, then adding a feature here or adding something, a feature for the company then, not for the product, but like, I think of it the same way as developing a product. Yeah. That's so cool. I want to just circle back. So the pandemic happened, everyone is at home, and people started making videos about this new Soothe 2, I guess that's when it came out. That was sort of, because Soothe was great, but Soothe 2 took that greatness to another So what happened there? Like, was it organic or like, did you guys make a lot of effort? As, yeah, as mentioned, people love talking about plugins and people can't shut up about plugins. So definitely organic. I mean, I can't throw a number out there, but we're just like joking about it might be 95% word of mouth. So I think my... role at OXSound has always been kind of a... it's very, very much product-centric and we want to know when we... what works with our plugin and what doesn't work and what's good and what's bad. We want the feedback. So I just started reaching out to the best engineers I knew that I had access to. I got access to engineers, the best in the world we're talking about. Usually like throw around the word like Grammy tier because they've received a Grammy or they're nominated for multiple Grammys or stuff like that. But it was actually possible to get access to these people, send them our plugin and ask them what do they think. No marketing involved, like no kind of like thought of, oh yeah, I'm going to use you in like our marketing and then we're gonna sell more plugins. No, we were actually interested in hearing what they thought. And more often than not, they loved it, more often than not, this actually helped them, this saved them time, it was a good fit for them. And then sometimes if they wanted, I could get a testimonial from them and then I could use that on our website, for example. But

Jakob Wredstrøm

It was mainly just getting sincere feedback about our product and being very much product-centric going forward in our marketing. And so during the pandemic as well, that's when people started, and we had already built this up, building up to the release of Su-2. I had already been sending it out to so many people before it got released, just so that we know that, do we have... do we have a good product on our hands? And it seemed like we did, like we did. And then when it actually got released, then it kind of like really, really exploded in popularity. And also it does help being, doing what it does when it comes to residences and kind of helping out. It fits very well into the home recording, home recording side of... of music production or... Well, I guess most of the market is there. That's the mass market, that is those applications. Yeah. It's not our market, but it does happen to be that it flows there. We make... I try to think that we make the products that the pros want to use, and because the pros want to use it, probably everyone else also want to use it. I mean, they don't differ in... how good they are, for example, and for who. If you have an amateur just picked up like recording and production, the same tools that work for the best in the world will probably work for this person if the user experience has been planned out well. So I don't see, I try not to differ between them that much. That makes sense, makes a lot of sense. I think one thing that's very important to say, you guys are not a one trick pony. Like it's, you know, obviously you've released two different versions of Soothe, but you also right now have Spiff, which hasn't gotten the same amount of hype, but in my opinion, just as different and unique. It does something else, but like when I've done audio production, I've probably used Spiff more than Soothe because it's a very creative tool. You just spend very briefly, what is Spiff and how did that happen? Yeah. I think to talk about Spiff.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Biff also helps to talk about soothe quickly. So we're calling soothe and soothe to a dynamic resonance suppressor, meaning that it suppresses resonances. Resonance is something that occurs that can be both good or bad, but something that occurs when recording stuff or just naturally in a sound. Usually if you record a vocal, resonances can occur because the voice is a certain way, the register is a certain way. The distance from the microphone, the microphone positioning, the microphone, the cable, the well, not much the cable, but the preamp and the room, definitely everything there can create resonances or add resonances to the sound. Now jumping over to SPF, so that targets actually the transient material of your sound. So in both of our processes, we are approaching... different element of the sound or like we're splitting up sound into its core elements or yeah if you if you want to call it that and then let's the user process that element so either add or remove in soothe it's removing resonances in spiff it's either boosting or cutting adding or removing transient information across the whole frequency range. So in its simplicity, what it can do is, for example, and being very, very detailed, we started, the main reason for creating it was actually to suppress or attenuate or cut mouth clicks in microphone. Noises that usually would get, would be something you hear on ASMR or stuff like that. So Obviously you can reduce those, but you can also increase them if that's what you like. But yeah, that's something that happens usually in pop nowadays when you have a very soft sung vocal, very close to the microphone, you put a lot of compressors on it, then you boost the high end in the audio. That's when you start hearing all this happening in your mouth. So it lets you suppress that. But also any...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Instrument, any sound, or most instruments have some kind of a transient element to it, which is usually the peak or an onset or an attack of a sound. And having access to that and actually being able to manipulate that kind of can boost the character or can change the character of the sound. But also the way I like to use it is actually to push elements closer to the listener in a mix or further away. Because that's also what happens when you're further away from a sound, you get less transients, less high-end, and then when you're closer to a sound, you get more transients and more high-end. That's great. And that really speaks to the diversity of your team, but I guess that's not where you guys are stopping. Like, you have moving forward for a sound, what does the future look like for you, both on a product side and on a business side? Yeah, since the release of Soothe 2, we knew that we had something... very special on our hands. And one thing that kind of also speaks to how it's very passion-driven is that we decided, so most developers and everyone that works at OXHound has a background in music in some way. Oli, Tommy, they both happen to have a background in live sound. And Oli needed Soothe for live. Because he was out mixing this orchestra that does like game music live. So he was kind of just, yeah, he was just frustrated that he didn't have access to his own tool when he was out mixing. So he spent a lot of years again and then we together with the company managed to... create a low latency version of Soothe that has now been made together with or for the Avid platform, Avid SXL platform, which is like a live mixing desk that many, many of the top live mixing engineers are using. So we released that back in April and already during the beta period, it was used on like

Jakob Wredstrøm

Then Rage Against the Machine, Roger Waters. Yeah, many different like big, big acts were already using kind of like this test version that we had out and then when it got released, it's now being used on so many big shows and I've been to those shows as well and that's kind of like, it feels really nice to kind of see our product. being used to that capacity as well, and not in the studio sense, but also in the live sense. So that was something we did spend a lot of time on, but now we're obviously also trying to make something that's not in the sooth space, and we have different ideas in mind. We have ideas that are closer to being a final product, and we have concepts and ideas, and I think that's also a nice thing that... We're not in a hurry to get something out, like we don't need the capital for that, for example. It's so we can actually really test it. And also have, as I mentioned earlier, having access to all of these professionals, we can have it in test mode until we know it's a smash hit. You can't do that in music. You can't release your song and then know that it's a hit and then release it again. But in the plugin side, we can have the most important users and have many of them try it out and then actually do making the changes until we know that we have something good and then release it. So that's where we're at the moment actually, trying out new concepts, showing it to some users and yeah, it's exciting times, new very different concepts like It still feels very much like OX sound, but it's a new approach and I'm very excited about those. Wow, that's exciting. I guess if there's a few producers in listening to this podcast, they'll probably also be excited by that. Well, it's just a very funny story. I was in the studio once and it was a pretty big studio and there was two interns in the studio and in the breakthrough we were talking about.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Soothe and I was like, oh yeah, one of my good friends is a partner there and they were literally starstruck like what? Like that's how that's how they're gonna impact us and these guys but how does you and me are very different and that's why I really love talking with you because I am a um almost uncontrollable ball of energy That likes to I love to fail like I love to just like try things and fail fast and move on and that kind of stuff and in my opinion, they're very opposite. So in this podcast, there'll be a lot of opinions and advices from my perspective, which is very one-sided. And since in my opinion, you're at the opposite end of the spectrum, could you, with your experience the last six years of creating one of the best plugging companies in the world, this is my opinion, but I'll give it. What advice can you give to entrepreneurs within music and audio? Are there some things you want to deliver as a message or a tip or something like that they could take away from this episode? Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's funny that you mentioned that us being very different because I guess it has to kind of like resonate with that as well. I think this is kind of an answer. This answer would probably differ depending on, or my answer to this question would differ depending on the time of the day even. But one thing that I've been thinking about lately is that it's a lot more important to have a direction than to have a goal. It's a lot more important to have a direction than an endgame. A lot of the best things that have happened in my life so far has happened or a lot of kind of like the resilience I've had as well has been because I was not assuming a very specific outcome. I've never been assuming like, yes, this is.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Exactly how it's going to happen. And this is how I visualize it and how I see it happening. And yeah, like I'm going to win, I'm going to be there and do this or like that. I don't work like that. I think I can't, my brain can't visualize those things that clearly, but I like having a direction. And then I like looking at my next steps. So I think goals work well for the short term for setting deadlines and getting stuff done, which you obviously is like a master of. But then direction is like I need to also protect myself from failure and like if you don't have those very, very specific goals. you can't really fail on those as well because you're still going. You have a direction and the direction is probably upwards. So you're doing the right thing in the end. Just check in with yourself, get a direction and follow that. That's great. Taking that advice, I think it also very much resonates with the storybook side that I know. So it looks like there's a pretty good connection there. Well, thank you, Hannes. It's been an honor having you on the podcast and I'm looking very much forward to see you again next time, like in different countries and we live very busy lives, but I'm very thankful to have you a friend and now as a podcast episode member. Yeah. Well, thank you, Henes. Have a great day and thank you. Thank you, Cast. Yeah.