- Polytechnic University of Telecommunications. Vallecas campus, Madrid, Spain.
Many years have passed since my university days. But I still remember one exercise that I particularly enjoyed: designing the logic of a lift. It is something we use almost every day, but nobody wonders how it really works. You had to decide when it opened its doors, which direction it moved in and whether it should stop when someone called it, depending on whether it was going up or down.
I love thinking like that, in logical terms. Actually, it started much earlier. When I was little, my father used to buy me electronics kits and I would build alarms with a speaker and light sensors to tell if someone came into my room. I have always enjoyed building things and understanding the logic behind them.
But my profession veered far away from electronic circuits, logical reasoning and computer compilers. I ended up working in sound, yes, but not building mixing desks, amplifiers or speakers. Quite the opposite: using them day after day to give free rein to the creative side of the craft. Sound design and mixing.
I have spent more than fifteen years working as a sound designer and sound supervisor for film and television. Blacktone Studio began as my professional project and ended up taking almost all of my time, day after day. Little by little I left coding and transistors behind. It is difficult to be a sound designer and a full-time programmer. For years, engineering stayed in the background: it was still a way of thinking, but my day-to-day work was in front of Pro Tools, in front of a film and, at the end of the process, doing the final mixes for each project.
In Spain, the film industry has traditionally been very local, almost familial. And in sound, an editor has always had to know how to do a bit of everything. In recent years, the situation has changed somewhat with the arrival of platforms and the internationalisation of our productions. But I am still an all-round editor. I feel very comfortable editing dialogue, ADRs, recording or editing foley and mixing. You could say I specialise in every possible branch!
Until a job forced me to take my way of working one step further.
The footsteps I did not have
Early in my career, I worked on a daily television programme, with sketches, parodies and some pretty wild deadlines.
One of those programmes that looks simple on paper, but where the director’s vision, the impossible weekly deadlines and the more-than-tight budget meant that every week brought adventures that were more than difficult to overcome. One of those adventures was a parody of Game of Thrones. It had all been shot on green screen and needed a whole world of snow. There was no time or budget to do the foley in the usual way it would be done on any other production.
I recorded my own footsteps on cornflour; a classic. I organised them and mapped them across a keyboard so I could perform them directly into the session. All I wanted was to finish and deliver the programme. Before long, I started asking more of the instrument: better response, variations, a natural sound, an attractive graphical interface… To make that happen, I had to learn KSP, Kontakt’s scripting language, through trial, error and many hours of work. Without realising it, we were back at those code editors and compilers we had left behind at university years earlier.
A sampler was much more like that university lift than I had expected. Depending on the key, the velocity or the position of a control, the system had to make a decision and trigger the right sound. It was the same logic applied to the material I had spent years working with.
That urgent solution eventually became Foley Collection, the first foley sampler on the market. For me, it was the starting gun for a new business adventure. To this day, it is still one of the things I am proudest of in my career. Foley Collection helped people learn my name and, with it, the rest of my work.
Blacktone grew and we built our own foley room. We stopped depending on hired rooms and other people’s material so we could record exactly what we needed. Little by little, we gave shape to Originals: a deliberately designed collection, an instrument built from the needs of real projects, our own recordings and the knowledge accumulated over years of using Foley Collection. The code grew to around six thousand lines of KSP. As you can imagine, it was not a quick development: it kept me working for years, more than six years, alongside all the day-to-day work of the studio.
Something similar happened with recording ambiences. I had spent years recording and cataloguing field recordings for my own projects. In 2015, I looked at all that material and thought: if it was already being heard in the work we were doing, it could also be useful to other professionals. That is how Surround Sound Lab began.
The need still comes first today
Foley Collection and Surround Sound Lab seemed like different projects. One came from the speed demanded by television; the other, from going out to record and returning to the studio with real places properly captured. To me, however, they were always the same thing: when a need arises in the studio’s day-to-day work, we look for a way to solve it and, if it really works, I turn it into a tool that someone else can use.
The new phase we started last year, creating applications and plugins, has exactly the same origin.
Multichannel REC began because I wanted to record with our 84-channel ambisonic SPCMIC without carrying a laptop, its power supplies and half the studio in my bag. Streamers began so the foley artist could have visual references for events during recording sessions and see the shot changes needed to perform certain sequences. AXIS Upmixer appeared after I heard in the mix room that a stereo song lost the openness it had arrived with. Inside Pro Tools, Infinity Rack brings back the freedom to chain and manipulate effects that I had enjoyed years earlier while DJing with Ableton Live.
Today, I am incredibly proud to be able to use our own plugins and processors on the projects we do at the studio.
That is the reason for Kaizen, our new name.
Kaizen (改善) is a Japanese philosophy that means continuous improvement, with small daily steps. It describes our journey much better than any idea of total reinvention. It has been a succession of small problems, tools that grew, libraries born from projects and a studio that allowed us to listen, record and mix better and better.
Kaizen Audio finally brings together everything that had grown as independent projects until now: Foley Collection, Surround Sound Lab, the applications, the plugins and Blacktone’s daily craft. Each project retains its own history, and that is precisely what gives meaning to the whole. They all share the same principle: sound comes first and the tool is there to serve it.
For me, it is also a way to organise what I have learned over these 20 years and give it the importance it deserves. To build something that can represent who we are and what we do. The legacy of our work. Welcome to Kaizen Audio, our new home, and yours too.