i used to be a touring artist. playing shows, writing music, living inside the cycle of create-perform-repeat that every musician knows. it was everything i wanted.
somewhere along the way, i discovered Cycling '74 and Max for Live. the idea that you could build your own instruments, not just play them, changed how i thought about music entirely. i started patching instead of practicing. building tools instead of just using them. the line between making music and making the things that make music got beautifully blurred.
then i got sick. a life-threatening illness that took touring off the table. the stages went away. the travel stopped. the identity i'd built around performing had to be rebuilt from scratch.
music didn't stop. it just changed shape. what had been a career became a hobby again. and honestly, i love it more now than when it was a job. there's something liberating about making music because you want to, not because you have to fill a setlist or meet a release schedule.
but that itch, the Max for Live itch, the "i want to build my own tools" itch, never went away. it grew. from Max patches to C++. from simple effects to spectral processing. from prototypes to something i believed could actually ship.
KERN came from a specific frustration. i needed a resonance suppressor. the good ones cost $199 and required iLok. the cheap ones were cheap for a reason. i wanted something in between: genuinely good DSP, no DRM nonsense, $29, done. so i started reading papers. ERB filterbanks. spectral reassignment. zero-delay feedback smoothing. weeks of research before writing a single line of code.
that became SMOOTH. and the process of building it, the research-first approach, the constraint of five knobs, the blind testing against established tools, felt like something worth repeating four more times.