Studio & Craft

From real to virtual

Big Wave Audio brings together musicians, sound engineers, and software developers. This is the way from a room with microphones and recording gear in it to an instrument you can play.

Silhouette of an engineer at a control-room desk, a session open on the screen between two studio monitors.

The instrument

Instruments & gear

We use blind listening tests to pick our favourite instruments, microphones, and signal paths, and tune each instrument for optimal sound and playability. This yields natural, true-to-life emulations that capture instruments in their ideal technical and musical condition.

An acoustic guitar in front of a rack of outboard gear, with condenser microphones set up at the soundhole and along the neck.

A bass player recording in the studio, surrounded by outboard racks and synths.

The performance

Session musicians

Over the years, we've built a large network of session musicians covering a wide range of genres. They bring their musicality and expertise to each of our projects. Captured performances by studio musicians are at the core of our products - that's why parts created with our libraries often feel like real recordings.

Recording

Recording studios

We design and build our own recording and listening spaces, including silent ventilation, air conditioning and electromagnetic shielding. Under the guidance of Philip Newell - former technical director of Virgin Records' recording studios division and author of "Recording Studio Design" - we've learned that an uncoloured listening environment is the cornerstone for sonically exceptional end results.

A wireframe architectural drawing of one of the control rooms, showing the desk, the monitor positions and the shell of the room.

A finished control room: acoustic panelling and slatted diffusers around the walls, monitors and a session screen at the listening position.

Sample production

Sample post-production

We have developed our own sample post-production tools. Hitpoint detection, cutting, fading, grouping, sorting, tuning, noise removal, naming, quality control and mapping of tens of thousands of samples per library are highly automated. This suite makes large-scale sample production consistent, precise, and efficient.

A batch of takes stacked as waveform lanes, each with its detected hit point marked and the pre-roll measured off it.

A false-colour map of pitch deviation over the length of a note, with the tracked fundamental drawn across it.

A spectrum of a single sample with the octave bands it is measured in shaded across it.

A decaying waveform with its amplitude envelope, the regions where a loop may be cut shaded green.

An original sample and its morphed counterpart drawn over each other, with the cross-fade window marked.

The virtual instrument

Engine design

From emulating different playing styles on guitars and basses, to automatically selecting the right percussion sample for a given playing speed in our "Session Percussionist" series, our playback engines tackle the technical heavy lifting - so you can focus on the music.

Sound & content design

A constantly growing team of internal and external sound designers and composers creates patterns and sound presets, giving each of our libraries their unique sonic character. Curation and fine-tuning happens in-house, in our control rooms designed by Philip Newell.

Handwritten mapping and preset sheets spread across a desk in front of a screen showing a sampler instrument.

See what came out of it

In development

Watch our new engine take shape.

This is our growing engine codebase, visualized straight from the development repository.

Get notified early