The origins of Audiority
This is how an unfortunate accident lead me to create my own company, blending my two great passions: music and IT.
I was born in the 1980, in Naples, a city where arts and music are part of its soul. My parents introduced me to music and computers from a very early age. I remember having my first computer (a Commodore VIC20) when I was about 5, while my first little guitar even earlier and my first keyboard (one of the early Casio toy keyboards) in the late 80s.
In my life, computers and music were always my trusted companions. I got my first PC when I was 12 and my first bass guitar at 13. That instrument became instantly MY instrument.
I had few friends who also played music, so we ended up making a band and playing (mostly) rock and metal covers. In the meantime, I was learning how to build computers by myself, how to configure them and how to program with BASIC and Pascal.
The internet was one of the key elements of my life: having the possibility to find information and learn new stuff was unbelievable, my own Library of Alexandria. I started learning what HTML was and, a bit later, PHP and C. During those years, I started looking at all the marvels of software for music production: FastTracker, Cubasis and so on.
At the end of the 90s, as a bass player, I joined a Progressive Metal band and we were writing our own material, along with playing some covers. The first software synthesizers were appearing on the market and I began to study them, since I found them fascinating. Here comes my first synthesizer ever: an old Yamaha DX21. A four operators FM synth with chorus, some broken keys and an awful edit panel! It sounded so gritty and metallic and I loved it.
January 5th 2002 was a life changing day in my life. My band and I were rehearsing for a live show expected for that night and, a couple of hours before going on stage, I felt like a razor cutting inside my arms. We had the show, but after that day I had to stop playing bass for good due to a damage to my tendons. I couldn’t imagine that what was, back then, the worst day in my life ended up being the beginning of who I am today.
I couldn’t live without music, so my struggle was to find something I could play without stressing my arms. A friend of mine introduced me to Liquid Tension Experiment (a Dream Theater spin-off) and I were shocked by their sound! It took me a little while to figure out that one of the solo guitar sounds I was hearing was a synthesizer. I wanted to know HOW to make those sounds. So I started studying synthesis and sound design.
In 2003 I started working as an IT Manager for a local company and, since I was still living with my parents, I could spend all of my wage on hardware. I remember purchasing a synth, learning how it works and why it works that way, making sounds with it and, in the end, selling it to get a different one. In a few years, I started to master the art of sound design and the idea to make a living out of this began to grow inside of me.
In 2005 I opened Progsounds.com, an internet forum dedicated to synthesizer’s programming. The community grew a lot in a few years and that became my first user base for Audiority when it started in 2010.
Before Audiority, I tried my first commercial product branded as Progsounds and the response was terrible. I decided to cut my ties with that past and to create something new, while learning from my past mistakes.
On Progsounds, I was releasing free synth patches and Omnisphere was just released. I decided to reprogram the top downloaded sounds on Omnisphere and create my first soundbank. I made a proper ecommerce, with a decent look and a bit of marketing to target Progsounds user base. It worked!
In 2013 I decided to quit my IT job, leave the country and try to grow Audiority into a profitable business. While in Dublin, I created another brand (Epic SoundLab) focused on cinematic Kontakt libraries for composers.
Both brands were doing great, but I felt that the soundware niche was becoming too crowded. A dear friend of mine pushed me to get back on programming and learn how to develop audio plugins. It was very hard at the beginning, considering that the last time I programmed in C++, I was a teenager.
In 2014, our first plugin was released: The Abuser.
The Abuser is a distortion/waveshaper created with an algorithm I developed many years earlier on Reaktor. I was super excited to see the response from the customers and how the business started to become sustainable.
In 2016 I moved back to Italy and I wanted to learn how to simulate electronic circuits. I already had a little background in electronics from my teenage years, but I never had to properly analyze a circuit to transpose it to a digital model. It took me almost a year before I was able to create something good enough to be included in a plugin.
While learning electronics, I also started to learn 3D modeling, since I felt that a proper simulation of a vintage instrument deserved a proper GUI. These efforts led me to make Echoes T7E, a simulation of the legendary Binson Echorec 2 used by David Gilmour.
The response from our users was way beyond my expectations and that’s how I decided to focus Audiority exclusively on audio plugins and, mostly, on analog models.
Ahead in the future, I see Audiority releasing a synthesizer and other historic effects, along with new creative devices.