An interview with UJAM's Jannik Hainke and Christoph Lange
24/07/2020
PreSonus: Introduce yourselves! Who are you and where is your team located? How long has UJAM been around?
J&C: Hi there! We're a music software company based in the beautiful city of Bremen in the north of Germany! Our company was founded in 2010 by musicians and technology nerds, and we're proud to say that two of our co-founders include Pharrell Williams and Hans Zimmer. For many years we were a consulting company developing cool technologies for ourselves and others, but in 2016, we decided to branch out and start making our own virtual instruments and plug-ins. It's been great-we've discovered that we love making instruments and plug-ins for musicians.
P: What makes UJAM products different from the WIDE array of virtual instruments available from other developers? What sets UJAM apart?
J&C: Our products sound amazing, and we pride ourselves on our quality German engineering but I think what really sets us apart is our fanatical obsession with ease-of-use. I think from day one, our goal has always been to build instruments that are simple enough for total beginners in a bedroom studio but great-sounding enough that serious professionals will use them on their big-budget productions.
We don't want our products to feel super tech-y or require years of production experience to use properly. That's why we design the interfaces for maximum clarity and set up our frustration-free controls so you always get musically interesting results no matter how you set the knobs and other controls. Basically, you can be up and running in a few seconds with very little knowledge but there is enough depth there that you can keep using our instruments years later when you've become a professional! That's what we strive for, anyway.
P: How do you choose what niche to fill in a product family? For example, Virtual Bassist or Virtual Guitarist each have up to five stylistic varieties. How do you choose what styles to pursue and develop an instrument for?
J&C: There's no simple answer for this one. In general, we look at what our customers are saying, what is happening in the marketplace, and what kind of genres we are excited to cover ourselves. I can say that we definitely avoid chasing trends since trends come and go quickly and end up sounding dated. Instead, we do our best to find styles and genres that musicians will continue to find useful and interesting for many years.
Once we decide on a certain genre or style, we hire session musicians to record the sounds and patterns we need for a virtual instrument. If we're developing a plug-in effect, we research and create the effects and effect chains in-house. Thanks to our glorious Gorilla Engine software development kit, we're able to create products very quickly!
P: The new Finisher series seems to be a different and exciting direction for UJAM. What (or who) inspired it?
J&C: Finisher is actually a spin-off feature from our highly successful Virtual Guitarist CARBON. For CARBON, we realized we needed something special to get those beautifully distorted sounds happening quickly so we invented Finisher. As soon as CARBON was released, customers started asking us to give them just the Finisher part as its own separate plug-in! We released Finisher MICRO as a small, free product in December 2019 and it was a huge success, so we followed in 2020 with Finisher NEO (an expanded version of MICRO) and VOODOO.
For those that aren't familiar, our Finisher products are really cool-this plug-in is like having the mother of all pedalboards to process your sounds. Each Finisher product (currently Micro, NEO and VOODOO) has its own sonic signature and has up to 50 separate effects inside itself. Those effects are connected and routed to each other in dozens of different ways that you can load instantly. The cool thing is that our sound design team puts in countless hours to find those cool combinations, and countless more hours to figure out how to control all the available parameters with a super-simple interface. This lets you get totally awesome effects on your guitars, synths, drums and other sounds without spending an eternity setting up and dialing in 50 separate effects one by one. We do this crazy, difficult stuff so musicians can have fun. As someone here once said It's supposed to feel like flow, not work!
P: Is there anything in particular about Studio One that you feel makes it a strong host for UJAM instruments?
J&C: Well let me start by saying that we have quite a few fans of Studio One here, so that certainly doesn't hurt!
The recent addition of Chord Track and Key Switch Editing in Studio One 5 has made it a fantastic choice for our Virtual Bassist plug-ins! We're delighted to be the first company to support these features right from the start. With the Key Switch integration, our Virtual Bassists (ROYAL 2, ROWDY 2, MELLOW 2 and the new DANDY) report their key switches display articulations with their names automatically. Chord Track detects and displays the chords that have been played, so newly recorded passages will follow the established chord progression. Our bassists automatically change the MIDI notes for you when Chord Track enabled, so things stay not only in time but also in tune. It's really nicely integrated!
DANDY is UJAM's latest product, and available at a discounted intro price of $89 USD!
P: In software development, it's common to see customers using products in fascinating ways that were not intended during development. What are some of
LINK: | https://blog.presonus.com/index.php/2020/07/24/interview-ujams-jannik-... |
See more stories from presonus |
More from PreSonus
22/03/2024
Create Rhythmic Alchemy with the BeatCoder
By Craig Anderton Over three years ago, I wrote a blog post on how to make a drumcoder. Its design was somewhat like a vocoder-drum audio served as a modulat...
15/03/2024
Make Stereo Downmixes More Immersive
By Craig Anderton One of Atmos's coolest features is scalability. No matter how complex your Atmos project may be, you can render it as Binaural, 5.1, 5.1....
13/03/2024
Studio One: A Brief Exploration with Great Good Fine Okay
Watch the Brooklyn Synthpop duo remix their song Blame in Studio One Less than 24 hours after meeting each other, producer Luke Moellman and vocalist Jon San...
10/03/2024
Stamp Out Boring Flanging!
By Craig Anderton The impetus behind this design was wanting to add envelope flanging to amp sims like Ampire. But there's a problem: most amp sim outputs ...
01/03/2024
Creating Room Ambiance with Virtual Mics
By Craig Anderton Supplementing close-miking techniques with room mics gives acoustic sounds a life-like sense of space. Typically, this technique involves pla...
27/02/2024
Notion Mobile 3.3 Now Available
Notion Mobile v3 took mobile music creation to the next level with support for iOS, Android, Windows, Fire OS and macOS. Now v3.3 adds many enhancements and fix...
26/02/2024
The Sweet Spot with Grammy-Nominated Producer 6ix
Logic's Grammy-nominated producer breaks down his Sweet Spot. Before he found success as an avant-garde hip hop producer, 6ix was just 30 units shy of a de...
25/02/2024
The Sweet Spot with Multi-Platinum Producer Warren Huart
The Grammy-nominated multi-Platinum producer breaks down his Sweet Spot. From the studio with chart-topping artists like Aerosmith and The Fray, to empowering ...
23/02/2024
Don't Make This Mixing Mistake!
By Craig Anderton Do you think of mixes in absolute terms, or relative terms? Knowing the difference, and when to apply which approach, can make a huge differe...
16/02/2024
Tuff Beats
By Craig Anderton Calling all beats/hip-hop/EDM/hard rock fans: This novel effects starts with drums modulating the Vocoder's white noise carrier, and take...
09/02/2024
Reinvent Your Stereo Panning
This tip is about working with stereo, NOT about Dolby Atmos or surround-but we're going to steal some of what Atmos does to reinvent stereo panning. Stud...
07/02/2024
Studio One: Mix in a New Dimension with Jeff Ellis
The GRAMMY-winning recording and mix engineer shows us how he uses Studio One to create an artful immersive mix. Jeff Ellis is a force to be reckoned with. The...
02/02/2024
Presence Electric 12-String (the Artist Version Remix)
Presence's sound library includes a fine acoustic 12-string guitar, but not an electric one. So, perhaps it's not surprising that one of the more popula...
26/01/2024
Faster, Simpler, and Better Comping
At first, this might not seem too exciting. But follow the directions below, and try comping using this method-I don't think you'll be disappointed. Thi...
19/01/2024
How to Quickly Slash Your Latency
You know the feeling: You're tracking or doing an overdub with a virtual instrument or amp sim, but you're frustrated by the excessive latency inherent ...
12/01/2024
How to Fix Phase Issues
Recording audio using more than one feed from the same source may create phase issues. For example, when miking a bass amp and taking a DI (dry) input, the DI...
05/01/2024
Bigger, Wider Sounds: Try Stereo Miking
If you haven't experimented yet with mid-side stereo miking, you'll be in for a treat when you do. Here's why: Record background singers with gorge...
29/12/2023
How to Prioritize Vocals with Mix Ducking
This complements the tip Better Ducking for Voiceovers and Podcasts and the tip Why I Don't Use Compression Anymore. It applies the concept of voiceover duc...
22/12/2023
Should You Use Highpass Filters when Mixing?
Engineers sometimes advocate using high-pass filters to clean up the low end and tighten the sound. Others believe that because of issues inherent in highpass...
20/12/2023
Studio One: A Brief Exploration with Josh Cumbee
The GRAMMY-nominated artist, producer, and songwriter shows us how he uses Studio One to cook a musical idea from scratch. Josh Cumbee is a triple threat: The ...
15/12/2023
Why I Don't Use Compressors Anymore
This wasn't a conscious decision, or something I planned. But when I looked through my last few songs while seeking candidates for a book's screenshots,...
08/12/2023
Phrasing-The Final Correction Frontier
First, a follow-up: In the October 13 tip about creating Track Presets for parallel processing, I mentioned that Track Presets can't include buses, which is...
01/12/2023
Vocoder Tweaks and Tricks
Vocoder's aren't normal effects. For example, Arturia's Vocoder V is an effect/instrument hybrid, because it's an audio effect that includes a...
24/11/2023
Release Your Music in Stereo and Immersive
For over a decade, stereo and mono vinyl records co-existed before the transition to stereo was complete. During that time, many records were released in both m...
17/11/2023
String Arrangements Made Simple
Strings can enhance almost any genre of music-and with a little more effort, you can do string arrangements that go beyond simply adding a string pad preset. So...
10/11/2023
The Metal Amp De-Harsher
Since Dynamic EQ was introduced in version 5, I've used it to replace and improve some techniques I used to do with static EQ. For example, I'm a fan of...
03/11/2023
Capture-and Keep-Your Creative Impulses
Gregor Beyerle recently posted a video called Producer vs. Engineer-What's the Difference?, which had quite a few comments. It seems most people feel that f...
27/10/2023
Better Drum Reverb with Dynamic EQ
Sending too many low frequencies through reverb gives a bloated, muddy sound. This is one reason why you'll rarely see a send from a bass track going into r...
20/10/2023
A Happy Accident for Drum Sounds
While trying to do something else with Melodyne, I stumbled on this way to add depth or tightness to drum sounds-quickly and easily. Here's the sound of an ...
13/10/2023
Create Track Presets for Parallel Processing
Parallel processing splits a signal into two or more parallel channels. Bi-amping is a common example of parallel processing: One channel processes low frequen...
06/10/2023
Easy Atmos: Grab Headphones, Mix, Have Fun!
Everyone talks about the importance of Dolby Atmos for post-production, but the implications go further than that. Atmos really does change how you create and ...
29/09/2023
You Can Do Immersive Audio. Right Now.
You don't need a massive surround system with speakers wired all over your studio to create immersive audio. Whether you want surround or Dolby Atmos mixes...
22/09/2023
Better Ducking for Voiceovers & Podcasts
By Craig Anderton Background music or environmental sounds are usually an essential part of commercials, movies, presentations, podcasts, and more. When doing ...
15/09/2023
Steal Your Intro-with Ripple Editing
The post Mixing la Studio One had a great response, so here's another tip that relates more to making better music than making better-sounding music. We...
08/09/2023
Quick EQ Fixes with Dynamic Tilt EQ
This FX Chain's inspiration is the Tilt filter circuit created by Tonelux designer Paul Wolff. First used in the Tonelux MP1A mic preamp, the Tilt filter h...
01/09/2023
Create Authentic, Customizable EDM Pumping with X-Trem
But first, some breaking news: Version 1.5 of The Huge Book of Studio One Tips and Tricks is now available from the PreSonus shop. Like previous versions, it...
25/08/2023
Superspeed Comping with Studio One 6.2
Studio One 6.2 reworked Layer and Take handling, and some of the new functionality is exceptionally useful. For example, suppose you want to record comp vocals ...
18/08/2023
The PhaseTone Warper
We haven't done a boutique digital effect for Studio One Professional in a while, so let's use a plugin in a totally wrong way-yet end up with somethi...
11/08/2023
Improve MIDI Drum Loop Flow
MIDI drum loops have a bad rap, because some musicians consider them metronomic and boring. But they don't have to be. Subtly leading or lagging the beat at...
04/08/2023
Mixing la Studio One
Ask 100 recording engineers about their approach to mixing, and you'll hear 100 different answers. Here's mine, and how this approach relates to Studio ...
28/07/2023
FL Studio Meets Studio One
FL Studio is a cool program. Yet when some users see me working with Studio One's features like comping tools, harmonic editing, the lyrics track, Mix FX, M...
21/07/2023
Make Bass Pop in Your Mix
Bass has a tough gig. Speakers have a hard time reproducing such low frequencies. Also, the ear is less sensitive to low (and high) frequencies compared to midr...
18/07/2023
Notion Mobile 3.2 Now Available
Notion Mobile v3 took mobile music creation to the next level with support for iOS, Android, Windows and macOS. Now v3.2 adds many enhancements and fixes, as we...
14/07/2023
Enhance Your Reverb's Image
First, an announcement: If you own the eBook How to Record and Mix Great Vocals in Studio One, you can download the 2.1 update for free from your PreSonus acc...
07/07/2023
Free! Three Primo Piano Presets
Let's transform your acoustic piano instrument sounds-with effects that showcase the power of Multiband Dynamics. Choose from two download links at the end ...
24/06/2023
Fix Boring Acoustic Drum Loops
Acoustic drum loops freeze-dry a drummer's playing-so, what you hear is what you get. What you get. What you get. What you get. What you get. What you get. ...
16/06/2023
3 Special FX for Lead Guitar
Melodyne can do much more than vocal pitch correction. Previous tips have covered how to do envelope-controlled flanging and polyphonic guitar-to-MIDI conversio...
09/06/2023
MIDI-Accelerated Delay Effects
Synchronized echo effects, particularly dotted eighth-note delays (i.e., intervals of three 16th notes), are common in EDM and dance music productions. The foll...
04/06/2023
Friday Tips in the Real World: the Sequel
This is a follow-up to the Friday Tips in the Real World blog post that appeared in 2020. It was well-received, so I figured it was time for an update. Althoug...
26/05/2023
The Surprising Channel Strip EQ
Announcement: Version 1.4.1 of The Huge Book of Studio One Tips and Tricks is a free update to owners of previous versions. Simply download the book again from ...