It’s all about the workflow
Why we created Rum!
Here at Klevgränd literally everyone produces music on a fairly professional level. It is our passion after all. And this is what usually inspires and guides us towards new product ideas. What do I need? What would I like to have? How can this or that process become less annoying?
Developing our most recent percussion instruments, we wanted to enable the user to choose room type. This is something we believe has a major impact on the overall sound. While testing these instruments we realized it would be very convenient to be able to immediately switch between different rooms for instant feedback on the differences in sound. Most dedicated IR plug-ins require some effort to switch between impulse responses making it harder to make a fair comparison. In our instruments we’ve decided to have it just a click away, and the curated (small) list of rooms hopefully encourages the user to experiment and to find the most suitable one with ease.
Both some of our beta testers and ourselves came to the realization that a set of impulses packaged as an independent plug-in would be great for the workflow in a mix session. This is the actual backstory of why Rum exists.
Collecting and selecting
We started the project by visiting several places where we knew good recordings had been made. Each room was recorded with several different techniques, microphone settings and positions. In the end we had recorded about 30 rooms in 16 different ways – almost 500 stereo recordings in total.
Capturing all that cosy ambiance. On the right: recording an elevator.
From experience we knew that it'd be a bad idea to push all this content into a plug-in where a fast workflow is what you want, so we started to sift and decided to keep only 10 rooms. Each room however, has additional variations such as the possibility to choose what type of microphone setting you like (omni or cardioid) and being able to shift between three different kinds of impulses that were used while recording.
Other features we felt were important was filtering and control of the signal stereo width. These parts of the plugin (including the ducker, modulation and the stereo spread functions) are algorithmic DSP that we often use in combination with reverbs and room simulation and we really wanted to be able to control these things in the same place – all with the ambition of optimizing workflow.
We’re really proud of it. Hope you like it too.
Read more about Rum here: https://klevgrand.se/products/rum
Correct placement of folded lawn chairs and plastic mini-bikes was crucial.