The plugin company I wanted didn't exist.
So I built it.

I came up through live sound: touring, venue work, the kind of environments where there's no undo button. You learn to work under pressure, trust your instincts, and make decisions that have to be right the first time. You also learn how to survive difficult acoustic spaces, imperfect systems and unpredictable rooms, and still make the music connect.

Between tours, I was producing records in my own studio. In 2013, I joined Metropolis Studios in London, working on sessions with Pharrell, the Black Eyed Peas and Snoop Dogg. That world taught me something completely different: how timeless records are really made.

At Metropolis, it stopped being about compromise. The rooms were exceptional. The signal chains were exceptional. The artists were exceptional. Simplicity suddenly mattered more than complexity. Great engineering became less about "fixing" things and more about creating an environment where artists could deliver something unforgettable.

In 2015, Focal Press published my first book, Audio Production Tips: Getting the Sound Right at the Source. Around the same time, I began lecturing at the Abbey Road Institute while continuing freelance engineering and production work for artists including Dua Lipa and the rock bands that had always been closest to my musical roots.

Teaching changed the way I thought about audio engineering. You start seeing patterns in where people struggle, creatively as much as technically. You learn that the real challenge is rarely access to tools; it's friction, uncertainty and workflow. As the saying goes: if you really want to understand something, teach it.

By 2017, I had a growing list of plugin ideas, tools shaped by years of pressure, problem-solving and watching where engineers repeatedly hit walls. I tried outsourcing development, but nothing quite captured the workflows or feel I was after. So I enrolled in a part-time MSc in Audio DSP, a brutal return to maths and programming after nearly twenty years away from both.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit just as I graduated, and I moved fully into software. I joined Relab Development as Head of Products, working alongside people at the absolute top of their field. That experience fundamentally changed how I thought about audio software.

At Relab, I learned that building great products demands the same care, taste and obsession as making great records. It's not enough for a tool to be powerful. It has to feel right. It has to earn trust quickly, remove friction and make people want to create. More than anywhere else in my career, Relab taught me how to build products people genuinely love using.

I later joined Blackstar Amplification as a DSP engineer, where working on embedded systems and amplifier platforms taught me a different discipline entirely: efficiency. Limited processing power forces clarity in design. Every decision matters, every optimization matters, and great sound has to coexist with reliability, speed and real-world hardware constraints. It deepened my understanding of how to build tools that stay light and dependable when every cycle counts.

SoundHive is the result of everything that came before it.

Live sound taught me reliability under pressure. High-end studios taught me simplicity and permanence. Teaching revealed the hidden friction in creative workflows. Product development taught me how great tools are really shaped, emotionally as much as technically.

Every product we build sits somewhere inside that arc.