10 questions for Caspar Bock

Aug 22, 2024

Name

Caspar Bock Soerensen

Country

United States

Town

Pasadena

Company

Founded in

2019

Best known for

BA-1, Humanoid, Transit

First product

I Heart NY (2019)

Latest product

Humanoid (2024)

The founder of Baby Audio is Caspar Bock Soerensen. He established the company in 2019 to create innovative and creative audio plugins for music producers. Baby Audio has quickly gained popularity for its unique and user-friendly products.

Caspar Bock has been deeply involved in the design and development of the company’s plugins, aiming to provide tools that enhance the creative possibilities for musicians and producers.

As we worked on developing factory content for several of their plugins, we’ve had the pleasure of building a good relationship with Caspar. He kindly agreed to answer a few of our questions, and we hope you enjoy reading the insights he shared!

1. What inspired you to start Baby Audio?

I loved and collected music gear (mainly hardware) but also had a career creating digital products. At one point I had to downsize my home studio because my wife and I were living in a small 1-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. I couldn’t find good software replacements (in the form of plugins) for all of my hardware gear and especially needed a really simple but ultra punchy and dirty compressor. So I set out to make that. It became our first product and the beginning of Baby Audio.

The plugin that started it all in 2019: I Heart NY

2. How do you make sure your plugins are easy to use but still powerful?

A lot of thinking and effort goes into making the products. I wish I could give a better answer than that, but there’s not really a golden formula or shortcut. We spend a ton of time calibrating each feature and thinking about what the user needs in their workflow. I wouldn’t say we’ve even succeeded in creating a “perfect” product yet, but I do feel that we get better with every release. It’s this journey of continuous improvement that makes it fun and worthwhile to do.

3. Can you tell us a bit about how you design the look of your plugins?

Perhaps I can start by explaining what we don’t do. We don’t think about what gear looks like in the physical world and then try to create a “picture” of that to put on a screen. That’s kind of a backwards way of thinking about it. Instead, we try to think about the screen as the native working environment for software tools and come up with ideas for designs that use this environment in the most optimal way. We spend a lot of time on UX and UI design and it remains a work in progress for us. But I feel we get better with every release. It’s that journey that matters.

4. What makes Baby Audio plugins different from others on the market?

We always aim to do things that haven’t been done directly before. I say “directly” because inventing a truly new concept is hard in a world where so many great companies and developers have done so many great things. But, still, there are angles, concepts and ideas that have not been fully explored. We try to carve out space for ourselves in those places and build a catalog of unique products that do things you couldn’t do with any other plugins.

5. Do you work with musicians or producers when developing your plugins?

Always in the sense of testing, taking feedback and ideas etc. As far as deeper collaborative relationships go, we have a partnership with Andrew Huang, who’s an amazingly creative thinker and who inspires us to do new things. The first collaboration with Andrew was our plugin Transit, released in 2023, and we have more coming in the pipeline.

Baby Audio Transit created together with Andre Huang in 2023

6. How do you keep up with the latest trends in music production?

I obviously keep an eye out for what’s going on and any new ideas that are interesting. However, at the end of the day, we focus on making high quality tools that are capable of doing new things. We’d rather set trends than follow them. Easier said than done of course. But again: It’s all about the journey and incremental progress.

7. Can you give us a hint about any new plugins you’re working on?

More instruments (synths and drums) and V2s of all our older plugins. (This is an important point to us: Everything we do is a constant work in progress and as we improve in our capabilities as a company, we want to revisit older products and improve them to keep our catalog fresh).

The latest plugin by Baby Audio: Humanoid (2024)

8. Do you listen to feedback from users when updating your plugins?

Absolutely, and honestly it’s one of the most important processes in how we develop our catalog. If we didn’t have user feedback to rely on we’d be working in the dark. We encourage and act on user feedback and anyone reading this who has any comments can write us here: https://babyaud.io/give-feedback

9. What’s the most rewarding part of creating audio plugins?

I personally just love making new products. It’s a creative expression in its own right. Also, seeing users doing new things with our plugins that we never expected is always fun as well!

Introduced and released in 2023, Baby Audio BA-1 – A lo-fi and wicked synthesizer inspired by the Yamaha CS-01

10. What changes can we anticipate from Baby Audio since acquiring Denise Audio last year?

Both brands remain separate and BA users won’t really see any changes. But for Denise users, there’ll be a lot of improvements, including re-vamped / V2 versions of the entire catalog.

Many thanks to Caspar Bock ^ Baby Audio / Denise Audio for letting us interview him.

If you want to know more about Baby Audio and Denise Audio, visit their websites here and here.