remaincalm is based in Sydney, Australia and has been producing experimental audio software since 2008.

remaincalm wants you to have extreme, beautiful, incredible sounds that no-one else has.

remaincalm thinks you're doing great.

remaincalm software is opinionated and unique. At least, we try. That's what we're aiming for.

You probably already have some Valhalla verbs. We can't compete with those - no-one can, probably. We're not going to make a straight verb you put on everything. Same for EQ (see: Fabfilter) or 1176 emulations (see: like, everyone; some of them are even good).

What we can offer you is unusual colour you can't get anywhere else - creative tools that give you new sounds, but are still easy to use. We can do this by drawing on our team's decades of guerilla audio production experience and high-quality software engineering. The same way that classic hardware like, say, Juno 106, or an LA-2A has "no bad sounds" regardless of how you drive them, we've tried to do something similar here. Every dial controls multiple parameters, hand-tuned to produce interesting sounds that stand out in creative mixes.

These are tools for people who love music, who are still excited about making something new.

Ok, some more background.

remaincalm founder, Daniel Arena, has decades of experience in audio production and technology.

A lot of stuff was happening in music in the early 1990s. Popular music was absorbing more interesting sounds from the underground, and home recording technology was just beginning to get more accessible. Somewhere in there, Daniel found himself experimenting with "trackers" (early computer sample sequencers) and, separately, taking up guitar. Playing a power-chord on a borrowed wine-red 1993 Gibson Les Paul Studio through a second-hand Marshall JCM half-stack in suburbia is a life-changing experience.

This led to membership in the first of many bands, some of which flirted with actual success - awards were won, airplay was had, releases sold out. Bands need to record things, and Daniel took on responsibility for production, starting with humble Tascam tape demos, but leading (decades later) to a solid personal discography of twelve? albums and ten? EPs across five acts, plus another twenty-odd releases produced for other bands. It was never a full-time thing - there were always too many robots to program, or database systems to engineer.

There were some incursions into audio technology creation along the way - including some small improvements to an innovative open source tracker, Psycle. But it took a somewhat overconfident "You want a Nintendo DS-based drum machine you can play live? Yeah sounds easy no problem"-type conversation with legendary electromaniac, Spod to start getting deeper into writing audio software. That would have been around 2007.

Some of these software experiments found their way into the world. If you've used the wonderful Reaper DAW or the interesting and unusual Mod guitar pedals, you may have already seen some of these - Floaty, Avocado and Paranoia are widely used creative effects.

...time passes.

People sometimes reach a point in their lives where they either: buy a motorbike, or: quit their (actually quite fun, in retrospect) senior tech role, to set up a business to release audio software. This happened to Daniel in 2023. He continues to not own a motorbike.

Mixdown Magazine have published an interview. Here's a teaser: