Aqeel Aadam: Code, Creativity, and Democratization of Sound
The founder of Aqeel Aadam Sound discusses his flagship product 'Waymaker,' why he discourages people from buying modular synthesizers, and how his daily creative practice keeps him connected to the inspiration behind his innovative plugin designs.
Today, the Spotlight shines on musician, software engineer, and plug-in developer Aqeel Aadam.
Aqeel's got deep roots in Philadelphia's music scene—his grandfather was a jazz musician who gifted him his first guitar. That foundation led him from Princeton's computer science and music programs to a five-year stint at Google, and eventually to creating his own company, Aqeel Aadam Sound.
His plug-ins aim to bring the magic of hardware synthesizers and modular workflows into the digital realm. His latest release, Waymaker, ties together his entire ecosystem of products in what he calls "an expansive, inspirational environment to get lost in." Aqeel's here to walk us through this unique approach to music technology and share how he's democratizing complex modular synthesis for producers everywhere.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Aqeel Aadam album Swim, Simian)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Aqeel Aadam Sound at aqeelaadamsound.com
• Follow Aqeel on Instagram and Aqeel Aadam Sound Instagram
• Listen to Aqeel's music on Bandcamp and visit his personal site at aqeelaadam.com
• Watch Aqeel's videos on YouTube
Plugins and Software:
• Waymaker - MIDI sequencer plugin on KVR Audio
• Weeping Wall - Microlooper effect discussion on KVR
• Ridgewalk - Granular looper (part of AAS ecosystem)
• Download plugins and trials at Aqeel Aadam Sound
Other References:
• Mystery Circles - Record label that released Aqeel's albums
• Jeff Snyder - Professor at Princeton University
• Snyderphonics - Jeff Snyder's electronic instrument company
• Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk)
• Eurorack modular synthesis - Modular synthesizer format
• Generative music - Algorithmic composition techniques
• Modular synthesis - Hardware synthesis approach
• Plugin development - Software instrument creation
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I want to start by asking you about Waymaker. Tell me a little bit about it. It seems kind of like a milestone product in terms of—it's sort of like an evolution of—I'm putting words in your mouth, but it seems like a bit of an evolution or an important next step in your ecosystem. I'm curious if you could maybe tell me the story of the why behind that and maybe also like the what. What makes Waymaker what it is, and why did you choose that approach?
Aqeel Aadam: Yeah, I think you're definitely right to say it is an evolution. I think at the time I was—I mean, I still am—I was very proud of the first two products that I released, but I think after I kind of came up with the idea behind Waymaker and I was actually in the thick of it and developing it, it started making me feel like the first two products were almost like a proof of concept and started making me feel like they were kind of the precursor to what I was really figuring out. And I think the response to Waymaker has been similar, where I think a lot of folks were kind of in the proverbial building already and they were interested in what I was doing before, but I think Waymaker was kind of when they were like, "Oh, okay, this is like a real thing."
So I think the genesis for the ideas was very inspired by Eurorack modular and how I feel that sequencing and melody generation and all of these ways you can manipulate pitches and rhythms is something that's kind of an unheralded superpower in the modular format, which isn't really available in most other formats. I mean, if you think about playing a keyboard or playing guitar, you just kind of get what you play as opposed to this device that's like generating things for you.
So kind of the core thesis of the product was taking that experience of working with modular and making it just more broadly accessible, taking a lot of the things that might take five, six, seven, eight modules that cost you thousands of dollars and kind of distilling it into an experience that I think anybody could use or afford, basically.
Lawrence: Is that what you just articulated, this idea of taking what would have required multiple modules and making them accessible in sort of one package or one interface? Is that the problem statement you started with? And more generally, when you're thinking like, "You know what, it's time for a new plugin," are you thinking about a problem statement?
Aqeel: There's always a core idea that I want to tackle, and that's usually something that I do often in something like modular. And that's not to say I'm trying to recreate any particular product. I'm kind of recreating a workflow that I like to use—some combination of things or something that I just use to get started, spark inspiration, that sort of thing. So that's usually kind of where I start on the product side. I would say at the company level, you're totally right. I think the problem statement is kind of the democratization of ideas—helping folks who might not be able to afford all of the fancy gear that they see on Instagram or YouTube or whatever. Or just tons of people work primarily in the box for whatever reason, wanting to have multiple instances of something or if they want to reopen a project and pick up where they left off. Basically just kind of taking some of the concepts and ideas that I feel like are kind of locked away in particular formats right now and trying to make them a bit more accessible.
Lawrence: I want to double-click for a second on the—you use the word democratization. I get the sense from reading other things about you, especially in your musical work, that that's not a throwaway term you're using. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of that accessibility, and maybe even if it's not too heavy-handed of a way to say it to you, like the political aspect or political motivation, if there is any behind that mindset?
Aqeel: I would say where I'm coming from is when I was kind of in college or whatever, and kind of thinking about where I imagined my career going, I thought it might be nice to be a teacher. I think teaching music, teaching modular synthesizers, whatever, always appealed to me. I almost feel like that's kind of still what I'm doing in a way where by creating products, I feel like I'm encouraging people to think about things in a particular way. I guess you can't totally control or steer what people are going to take away from that experience, but you can kind of probe them to start thinking about things or maybe expand their horizons. So I would say in terms of the democratization, I think that aspect is really just encouraging people to just keep an open mind, go into something maybe expecting to be surprised if you can do that. And I wouldn't say it's necessarily like there's any kind of political backdrop behind it, but I think in general it's just kind of encouraging people just to think outside the box a little bit. Let the box surprise you. You don't know what you're going to get when you open that Pandora's box, but hopefully the experience is fun. And from there you can kind of surf the wave that flows out of it.
Lawrence: What is it that, if you could speak more broadly and then also more personally to yourself, what is it that attracts people or lures them into modular synthesis? Because it's certainly like it's a rabbit hole that it seems like at some point you come across that rabbit hole and nine out of ten times, people jump in and then they're never heard from ever again. You have to send a search party out for them.
Aqeel: Yeah. No, it's true. I mean, I love modular synth, but to be honest, I typically don't encourage people to explore it. And I would say that's particularly because of what people are trying to get out of it. You'll kind of hear folks say like, "Oh, this is awesome. It's a format where I can do whatever I want. I'm going to build the world's best polysynth," and it's like, you might accomplish that, but you're probably just going to be happier spending that money on a Prophet or something and you're going to save money on it and have a better experience. That's a tuned instrument. It has knobs and sliders that do exactly—have a parameter range that is completely defined, and the whole thing is just a cohesive unit. Modular is not that. It is very much completely open-ended, completely beholden to whatever you want to do with it. I think a lot of times that open-endedness is very much a gift and a curse, so I think for me it is kind of an inspiration box and something that can contribute randomness and surprises to my composition process. When it comes time to lay down a drumbeat or lay down some chords, I am not turning to modular, picking something else off the shelf and using that.
So I think it is an excellent format just for kind of getting the juices flowing. But once they're flowing, I kind of turn away from it, build on top of that result, and I've personally found that's kind of the best way that I can create music with it. There are folks out there that are doing completely robust finished tracks, 100 percent on the modular. Typically they have like an entire warehouse of modules to choose from, and it sounds—it just scares me the idea of sitting there and patching it all up. So I typically just kind of work really fast with it. I'm pretty utilitarian. I'm just kind of trying to get from point A to point B and that goal is just to get something that just sparks inspiration and kind of gets that composition process flowing.
Lawrence: You know, it's so funny to hear you talk about it that way, because I always think like, how—what's the gap in time between when you get really into stockpiling modular synths and when you buy your first soldering iron, you know? It's like something tells me that it's right around the corner.
Aqeel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is kind of—it's heavily associated with like midlife crises, you know? It's like, "I'm going to smoke meats. I'm going to garden and I'm going to get this modular synth."
Lawrence: Yeah. That's what I tell people about what I do. It's like some people buy sports cars. I talk to people about free jazz. That's what seems like it's a much lower risk midlife crisis. Nobody's getting hurt. You mentioned your time in college. I'm so curious about—just talk to me about the different fields of study you undertook and how they—you know, how they interacted even at the time. Were they done in parallel or were you already drawing connections?
Aqeel: I would say most stuff was in parallel, so I was a computer science major and then kind of on the side, I dabbled in the music department. I ended up one credit shy of a music minor, which still kind of haunts me to this day. I got a lot of chance to kind of flex both sides of the brain for sure. And in particular, I got to work with one professor. His name is Jeff Snyder and he has his own electronic hardware company called Snyderphonics, where he builds instruments and sequencers and just a lot of really cool stuff. But he kind of had a foot in each department where he was—I think he was officially in the music department, but also worked in the computer science department. And he had a couple of classes that kind of straddled both departments. Obviously that was right up my alley, so I was definitely going to take them. And they were really interesting courses. They're—I think they're called Computer Music. That might have been the first one. And the second one was kind of Studio Techniques, which is really kind of like electronic music writ large. And they were just super interesting classes where you're kind of thinking about just kind of how a DAW works in general. How the buffer size works, how the sample rate works, all these things that I don't think you ever really kind of learn if you're just sitting there plinking away in Ableton or whatever, really learning the inside out, how this tool works. We also learned how synthesizers work from the ground up, like how an oscillator works, how a filter works, how you chain them together to create a synth voice.
We had this pretty robust eurorack synth in the classroom, which somehow he got funding for, I have no idea how, but we had these really cool assignments, which would basically be like, create music on the modular synth. There was no restriction, there was no direction. The assignment was just to sit with this thing and figure out how to make music with it. Maybe that's—you figure out how to record a melody and you say, "I'm good. I've made a melody." Maybe you kind of sample sounds off of it and then you kind of get back to a realm that you're more used to working with. You take those sounds into the DAW and do whatever you want with them. Or maybe you just figure out how to create a whole track and record it in one shot off of the machine.
So assignments like that really appealed to both sides of my brain—the engineering side and the music side. I think that those are the kind of experiences that I took forward, and eventually used in creating Aqeel Aadam Sound, just kind of thinking about that marriage between, okay, what do I want to do musically and how can this technology help me get there?
Lawrence: You used the word eventually. What were you trained for and what did you initially do in the first part of your career after school?
Aqeel: Yeah. So out of college, I did my time in big tech. So I worked at Google in ads and—at this point, I barely remember. I think I worked on Gmail as well for about five years total. So I was doing that for a while and that was hugely helpful just in terms of developing my engineering skill, working with senior engineers, learning how to walk into this room where we've got a product that has fifty million people using it every day and trying to figure out how do we incorporate something new without breaking the whole thing.
I mean, that was just hugely helpful just in terms of going from a computer science student to a software engineer where I'm actually thinking about—I know that I can do this task. I know that I can, given a problem, like, "Oh, implement this new feature or this new," whatever. I know that I can figure out how to, however, the engineering part comes from, how do I do this in a safe way? How do I do this in a way that isn't going to break somebody else's feature that they're trying to do too? How do I roll this out to people and ensure that it's not breaking anything? How do I demonstrate that this thing is actually working?
So all of these things are just an aspect of engineering that you don't really get an experience with in college as much when you're just kind of doing your little coding assignments and you get the right output and you say, "Okay, I'm good." It's working with others and learning how to digest a request and turn that into the actual feature, figuring out what people actually want or what they're really asking for, and what that actually looks like in the product. All of those things were just hugely helpful. But I was working in ads and working on Gmail, which is not super close to my heart. So it was great experience in terms of learning just how to improve my skills as an engineer, and then I am fortunate to kind of take those forward with an endeavor I care a little bit more about now.
Lawrence: Well, just to linger there for a moment, one of the things I find super interesting and I think that the general public has no real reason to think about much, but is I find incredibly fascinating, is this idea that you say you worked on Gmail or you worked on ads. Those systems are so many subsystems and so many features, and what the user sees as a product is really a distillation or a summation of all this other work that's going on. And it's like, you could spend years working in Gmail, but never work on the totality of Gmail, you know? It's so fascinating. Your time with Google came to an end. How did you decide to just not stay in that world and like—it seems like there's a bit of a leap that's been made, you know? You started a career path and you could have kept going down that path. I think I'd want to ask the question two ways. What wasn't fulfilling that you had to go get away from and what were you looking for?
Aqeel: Probably in my first year at Google, I had this thought, which was I would be disappointed if I woke up five years from now and I'm still doing the exact same thing. And I think it's also just generally important to check in with yourself on maybe a yearly basis. Like, do I still want to do what I'm doing right now? And maybe you don't have the ability to just nip that in the bud right then if you don't like what you're doing. But I think it's important to kind of know where you're at with it.
So I think about five years in, I started thinking like, I don't know if I want to do this forever. I really didn't like the last team that I was on. I was really butting heads with my manager and I was working remotely from the east coast on a team that was based on the West coast. So I was kind of miserable too. I had already been kind of thinking about looking for the door or what that would look like. How much we had in savings and kind of how long could I take a little sabbatical? And then that decision got made for me. I woke up one day and I was part of the first round of Google layoffs ever, which happened—
Lawrence: You're a pioneer! (laughter)
Aqeel: Yeah. That happened in 2022. I think it was right after kind of COVID and all this, like, are we going back to the office kind of stuff? So they just kind of said, "Oh, you don't have a job anymore, but here's some money," which is nice. I didn't have to make that decision ultimately, if I was going to kind of venture out on my own or what that looked like. I feel very grateful that I was kind of handed this runway to go try some stuff. I don't know if I would've done that on my own volition, to be honest. I was thinking about it and I kind of wanted to, but you know.
Lawrence: You needed the shove.
Aqeel: Yeah. I mean, do you ever really rock the boat when you have a pretty good thing going and it's kind of hard to complain about a fairly lucrative job? But ultimately I got sent out the door and I knew that I didn't immediately want to start looking for basically the same experience. And it was just a weird time. I mean, it still is a weird time in the market too, where I think all these tech companies like overhired and they're still kind of—some of them aren't hiring, some of them are still laying people off, and it's been like three years at this point. So I decided I'm just going to try to do music for a while. And at first that was trying to do some composition work. I was on Kickstarter, cold calling people, basically anybody who was making a film or a game or whatever. I was just sending them a DM and trying to see if they would take a flyer on me as a composer. I did some kind of like, I guess you would call it subcontracting with some local film composers, like if they needed a synth layer or whatever. I managed to get some music in a couple of libraries, which I don't think were ever used because I never got a check from ASCAP.
So I tried to do that for a while and it was just tough. I'm sure anybody listening who is a composer knows it's stuff and I kind of thought back to when I had a real job and I had disposable income. So I started just trying to flip the perspective a little bit where I felt like I and these other creatives are all kind of trying to hustle each other and trying to fight for scraps where I'm reaching out to people and I'm like, "Hey, I know you have a budget of like $300, but can I have some of that to do the music for your project or whatever."
And I decided that didn't seem like the path for me, specifically, and I tried to kind of flip that on its head a little bit and make something, try to produce something that I think would appeal to other folks who might not be professional artists or kind of might be hobbyists, might be folks who have an interest, basically. So I released some sample packs and some people were interested in that. But ultimately I landed on the plugin stuff because I had that set of skills when I sat down to kind of consider it, I started having ideas and I had always had opinions about the musical tools that I was using, the modules or the guitar pedals or whatever.
So it was kind of a natural next step to take those opinions and start doing actual product design. I think I landed in the place that I think I was supposed to be. I still try to do composition stuff when I can, but I'll be the first to admit I like a lot of the stuff that I write, but I think other people are much better at it and cream rises to the top and I think that I ended up kind of doing something different. That's okay. I think you kind of end up where you need to be.
Lawrence: Because you're a musician, which implies like a user of tools in your craft as well as a developer, it would seem to me that you'd be uniquely able to make some really interesting decisions around interface design and things like that. I'm curious about how you balance interface design and the issues around accessibility and things like that we talked about already. With, for lack of a better way to say it, the possibilities of what the tool could do. Are there conflicts or trade-offs you have to make to keep the tool usable?
Aqeel: Yeah, I think so. I tend from that perspective, I tend to lead with my engineering brain, which is more conservative, for lack of a better word, like kind of lazier. In the world of engineering, it's like you're not going to do something twice. You're not going to do something, you're not going to over-engineer something if you don't have to. I think a lot of the science of software engineering is basically how do I actualize this thing in the minimum possible steps.
So I think that kind of bleeds into the product design as well. I try to pay respect to the fact that these products are going to be used in a DAW, every DAW comes with a really awesome EQ, really awesome reverb or delay or whatever, compressor, everything. And so when I'm thinking about what this product is, I want it to be as distilled as possible. And sometimes you make concessions just to kind of make it more of a—to fit the workflow and make something feel a little bit more seamless. But in general, I'm kind of operating from the perspective of, what is cool about this? How do I get someone wrestling with that core concept and kind of the rest of it has to stand out of the way.
For the most part, I try to keep the interfaces relatively streamlined in terms of all of the extra bells and whistles when they exist are kind of hidden away a little bit, so you don't need to think about them. And I try to give people a pretty streamlined interface with maybe six or eight controls on the front panel, kind of similar to like a guitar pedal. I think it feels way more approachable that way. It feels like something that you can kind of look at and understand. If you don't understand it, that's okay too. You can just start messing with knobs and seeing what happens. So, in terms of the interface, I try to really distill it down to what is going to encourage people to kind of wrestle with the core concept here and kind of get them thinking about the thesis of this device and steer them towards that as much as possible.
In terms of visuals, try to throw some fun visuals into every product, which might show you what's going on. It might be a more abstracted version of it. I think that's really important to do in this format of software plugins where you can kind of show people as much information or as little information as you want. I try to make it fun. I try to draw a contrast with something like a guitar pedal or euro rack module where you're kind of really just looking at a bunch of knobs and maybe an LED that's changing colors or flashes or whatever. So I would say the overall experience, I just want people to kind of be exploring really. There's a limited number of controls intentionally. There's some fun visuals that might make sense and they might not, maybe it just becomes like digital wallpaper and that's okay. I think just as long as people are kind of using it and thinking about it, I think that's the experience that I'm hoping to get.
Lawrence: Are you a one person dev shop? Do you do all front end and back end?
Aqeel: Yeah, it's all me. I have one friend—shout out to Ian—who helps me with kind of the copy and some of the terminology or more technical things like tool tips and the manual and stuff like that. But otherwise, it's really just me. I'm doing all of the customer support, all of the design, all of the social media.
Lawrence: And at what cadence do you have to publish to keep your business viable?
Aqeel: Yeah. Well that's a great question that I don't know if I fully know the answer to. I try to keep an open mind and it's gone great so far, which I'm really thankful for. But I might wake up one day and it isn't viable anymore, and that's okay. I think that I still have stuff out there that I'm proud of and I'm happy exists, but I've tried to settle on a cadence of around two to three products a year. And I am getting faster at it, which is nice, and the products are getting more complex, so that's usually a good sign if they're getting more difficult, but you're cranking them out faster. I think Waymaker has three times the lines of code that Weeping Wall did, and two times the lines of code that Ridgewalk did. So products are getting more robust, but I'm managing to release them in the same amount of time, which I'm proud of, and I'm hoping to keep going.
Lawrence: Without divulging anything like product roadmap or things like that, I'm curious when you sort of look out at the landscape of music software, are there obvious problem statements you're looking at that you're excited to tackle or that you want to see the solution for?
Aqeel: Yeah, I would say there are two areas I really want to explore and I think are currently underdeveloped on the market. I think the first that comes to mind is something that I feel like I've tried to address already, which is just creating software which sparks inspiration. I think a lot of, or the majority of plugins out there right now are very utilitarian in terms of does what it says. Like, "Hey, this is our badass reverb. It sounds like a reverb, and it's great." There aren't as many tools that really surprise you or are things that you want to sit with. I feel like one of the reasons it kind of took me a while to figure out that I wanted to try to build plugins was because I had this preconceived notion that plugins are those things that I open and I tweak for twenty-five seconds, and then I close the window and never think about it again. Why would I want to do that? So I try to think about things that people might want to sit with and grapple with and something that, for lack of a better term, kind of demands attention basically. And I think that a lot of the best musical tools in general feel that way. Sitting behind me, I have a Juno, which is maybe the simplest poly-synth on the market, but it really rewards you just sitting there and playing it and messing with the sliders and everything is so tuned up so well. And I just want to encourage that experience with kind of whatever I'm building, something that you want to—that you just want to use, you don't want to utilize.
And I think the other thing I want to explore, I want to build products that are generative, but not necessarily random. And I think that there are a lot of products right now that kind of conflate those two concepts. For all intents and purposes, something might be a relatively basic tool, like this is a granular device, or this is a delay or whatever, and then they kind of slap an element of randomness onto it. Like, "Oh, there's a random chance that the grains are panned left or right," or whatever. And I want to think more about—randomness is one way to introduce complexity and variation. I think there are also a lot of algorithmic things to explore, which is kind of one of the things at the heart of Waymaker, there are all these kind of basic sequencers that you can pick and choose from, and some of them have an element of randomness and some of them don't. But I think you are generating a complex result from the sum of many smaller pieces. When you make a tweak in one of those small—it can have downstream effects that you don't really think about until you hear it. I think that is a form of generative music that does not involve randomness. It's kind of algorithmic and it's maybe a little obtuse, but you can hear the results and kind of think, do I like this? Do I not like this? And then steer from there. So I want to think more about that concept in future products where I'm thinking about how can I give people all the keys? The fun is in seeing what happens when you turn them. Basically. I think that not just relying on random output, having something that's repeatable and interesting and you feel like you're in control. That's something I really like exploring.
Lawrence: Interesting. You know, our listeners won't appreciate this, but you're sitting in front of a bank of synths. What's going on with your creative music life?
Aqeel: Yeah. I try to record something every day. I really like starting my days with just a little bit of music and kind of remembering, or being reminded of, what it's all for, really at the end of the day. So I just try to sit down and make something basically. And it doesn't have to be good. It doesn't have to be used for anything. But in doing that you just kind of sharpen your skills a little bit. And I try not to use my own products when I do that, just because that gets me into kind of engineering mode where I'm thinking about—now you're in quality control mode. I'm thinking about, "Oh, that could be a little better. Oh, there's a bug," whatever. So I try to kind of avoid my own stuff and in doing so, I mean, it kind of forces me to revisit the world that all this stuff is inspired by anyway. So just kind of tinkering with the modular or exploring a cool chord progression that I heard the other day or whatever. Just sitting down and taking that time to just noodle really. At this point I'm kind of accumulating stuff that I probably should release. But I haven't found the time to sit down and finish. I have this gigantic document of just kind of categorizing basically everything that I've written over the past few years and saying, "Oh, if a game opportunity comes up, this is a cool—I don't know, horror soundscape or, if a film opportunity were to come up, this is an emotional piano piece or whatever." I'm just kind of sitting on this gigantic repository of little snippets that would be nice to finish one day. I'm trying to come to peace with the fact that might not happen. And that's okay. And I'm happy that those pieces were recorded and exist, trying to just be okay with that being cool.
Lawrence: Yeah. It's interesting that what I'm hearing on the receiving end of that is you're enjoying tinkering and creating, but you don't have that compulsion to see the project through. Because I would imagine you'd be using much different language and even behaving differently if—you know what you're not saying is, "I'm working on the next album right now as we speak," but you are continuing to create.
Aqeel: I would say it's kind of a philosophy that I've stumbled on, and it exists for me as a composer and as a plugin designer, which is just that inspiration is one of the best things that we have as humans. It's something that we can't really control. We can't control when it shows up. We can't really control what it encourages us to do when it does decide to show up. So I just try to let things happen from that perspective. As a composer, I try to just sit back and see what I'm feeling that day. I think if I were to sit down and say, "I am going to write an album this week," it would probably be shit. So I kind of come from the position of, "I'm going to sit down and just see what happens every day." And then I'll kind of sort it out in post, "Oh, that would be cool to finish for an album. That could be cool for a game or whatever." And then I think that kind of philosophy bleeds into the plugins as well, where I try to give people tools that just could help them find inspiration. And Lord knows what happens when you find it. But that's part of the fun. You're just kind of riding the wave. So that's kind of how I operate as a musician and kind of how I try to encourage other folks to try in their own writing as well.
