Noem began with personal experiments that weren't intended for release. Putting them in other people's hands changes what we ask of them.
The plugins on this site began as personal experiments. There wasn't a plan to turn every idea into a release. We were following things we wanted to hear or play with, and some of those things became interesting enough to put in other people's hands. Noem is where we're doing that.
Building something for yourself gives you permission to follow a small idea without deciding whether it could become a product. You can spend time on one behaviour, leave other questions open and see whether you still want to use it. The result may only be useful for a particular kind of session. That can still be a reason to keep working on it.
Releasing these tools gives that process another stage. The person opening a plugin won't have been there for any of the experiments behind it. They'll bring a different session, a different way of working and a fairly reasonable question about whether this thing has a place in their music.
Keeping each plugin focused
There is already plenty of music software. A DAW's own instruments and effects can occupy years of attention. Another plugin has to offer some reason to leave a familiar way of working, even briefly.
For us, that reason can be quite specific. We are interested in instruments that let you work out a phrase by listening as it changes, and effects that let you alter the rhythm of audio you already have. Those interests give an experiment a direction. They also help us decide which additions would support it and which would turn it into a different tool.
There is a freedom in allowing that narrowness. If every idea has to answer every possible request, its most particular qualities become problems to smooth away. The strange rhythm needs a more conventional option. The awkward sound needs a more impressive preset. Another page of controls arrives to cover an exception. Each addition can be reasonable on its own, while the instrument slowly becomes harder to recognise.
We want to be careful about that. A short sequence makes the relationship between a few notes particularly noticeable. A changing pattern gives you something to respond to while it plays. These suit different ways of making music. Giving both the same controls and behaviour could remove the reason to choose one over the other.
Someone who already knows exactly which notes they want may have little use for an instrument that makes them approach a phrase indirectly. Someone else may find that detour is the whole attraction. Both responses make sense.
How a tool changes the way you write music
Consider a simple bass phrase: four notes, one of them held a little longer than the others. Move the last note earlier and it leans into the next bar. Shorten it and the drums have more room. Change its tone and the same pattern can become something you barely notice until it disappears.
There are several ways to make every one of those changes. Their value depends on what you hear while making them. With one instrument you might spend ten minutes choosing a timbre before touching the rhythm. With another, a gesture changes both and you end up keeping a phrase you hadn't intended to write.
This is part of what interests us about making software. If the easiest control to reach changes a sound's rhythm, you are likely to try rhythmic variations. If it changes the tone, you might leave the notes alone and work on the patch. The order in which you make those decisions can change the phrase you end up keeping.
It also has to give you time to answer. An endless supply of different results can make it surprisingly difficult to stay with one of them. There is always another variation to hear. At some point, the work becomes choosing a phrase, accepting its peculiarities and finding out what can sit beside it.
We care about that moment as much as the first sound. A tool has done something worthwhile if the result survives after you close its window and listen to the track.
What a public release needs
On your own computer, an odd behaviour can become something you simply remember. You know which setting to avoid. You know what a badly named control means. You can tolerate a little friction because the idea behind it still feels close.
A public release asks more. A saved project needs to make sense when it opens again. The controls need names someone else can understand. Installation instructions need to describe what actually happens. If a plugin depends on a host doing something a particular way, that limitation needs explaining before someone spends an evening trying to make it work.
Those concerns belong to the instrument too. They affect whether a person feels able to take a risk with it. It's difficult to explore freely while wondering whether you'll be able to recover the result tomorrow.
The fact that a plugin began as an experiment doesn't make a lost setting or an unclear instruction less frustrating. We want people to be able to rely on the ordinary parts of using it. There will be details to improve, and releasing the work gives people a way to explain which ones are getting in their way.
Learning from the people who use the plugins
Once a tool leaves your computer, you lose control of what it is for. A sound you thought of as percussion may become the pitched part of somebody's track. A brief effect may run for six minutes. Someone may use a single setting and ignore almost everything else.
We like the prospect of that. The explanation that accompanies a plugin can only describe the territory we know. Other people's music will give it contexts we couldn't have supplied in a demo.
It also changes what useful feedback looks like. A request makes more sense when you can hear the musical problem behind it. A missing control might be one way to solve that problem; there might be another. Knowing what someone was trying to keep, change or hear is more revealing than a longer list of features.
So this is the starting point for Noem: personal experiments, developed far enough to be shared, with room for other people to make something of them. We don't know which parts will find their way into your work. We'd be interested in the small uses as much as the elaborate ones: a few notes that stayed in a track, a sound you recorded and cut up, an idea that sent the session somewhere else.
If that happens, we'd like to hear it.