3 Years of Schwabe Digital
Five years ago, before Schwabe Digital even existed, I was sitting in my bedroom studio in West Philadelphia with some sketches in a notebook and a few transfer curves plotted out in Excel. At some point, I just Googled, “How do you build a plugin?”
I eventually stumbled onto a brilliant developer, and a few months later I was testing prototypes on records I was mixing and mastering.
It was the middle of the pandemic. Much of the world had slowed down, but somehow the studio just kept moving faster. A lot of musicians were at home making records, and I was locked in the studio finishing them. I worked on more than 700 projects that year and received my first Grammy nomination for mixing Baauer’s Planet’s Mad, which was nominated for Best Dance / Electronic Album. I was squeezing everything I could out of every day back then.
The busier I got making records, the more obvious it became that I needed a faster way to get the sound of my analog chain in my workflow. I was constantly printing mixes and stems through my chain in real-time and wondering if there was a faster way.
Eventually that question turned into an idea.
At the time, I was just doing it for myself and some friends. I was not trying to start a software company. I was just trying to build something that would help me make better records.
I got so lost in the process that before I knew it, two years went by and that little idea had become Gold Clip.
Since then, the work never really stopped. Gold Clip eventually became Gold Clip Pack. Orange Clip evolved into Orange Clip 3. Less than a year after releasing HiFAL, we are already preparing HiFAL 2.
You can see a pattern here. Every time I think I’m finished, I end up pulling on another thread.
Looking back, what stands out most is not the products or the updates. It is the process. Refining them, rebuilding them, turning them into tools that people never feel the need to replace.
That process produced hundreds of versions of every plugin, and also left a lot of abandoned plugin ideas sitting dormant in my Schwabe Digital plugin folder.
In fact, I built and abandoned at least six plugins because I did not think they were good enough to release. Probably not the smartest business decision, but I was never really thinking about it like a business. I was thinking about the tools I needed to mix and master records.
If I would not use it, I would not release it.
What started as a single idea eventually became something much bigger. Over the past five years, I found myself surrounded by talented mathematicians, developers, designers, product managers, and researchers who are pushing ideas far beyond where I could go on my own.
Today, I am still sitting in that same bedroom studio in West Philadelphia. The room has not changed much, but the ideas have. Some of those ideas are finally starting to take shape, and they remind me a lot of how Gold Clip felt in the beginning.
That same feeling that there might be something really interesting on the other side of the next experiment.
Coming soon.
Have questions? Just hit reply, and we’ll get back to you. You can also tag us on instagram—we’re always happy to connect!
Be well,
Ryan Schwabe
Grammy-nominated and multi-platinum mixing & mastering engineer
Founder of Schwabe Digital
