Leapwing Audio: their own best customers

One of the mixing world's most prolific software innovators, Leapwing Audio's incredible range of intuitive, incisive plugins have let users perform forensic mix surgery with ease, with the company's sideline in emulating the tones of iconic producers merely the cherry on the cake. We gave 'em a call...

cm: Firstly we must talk about StageOne 2. It's such a 21st century plugin, with its superb stereo visualiser and the smart phase recovery algorithm really changing the game for a lot of people. Was saving people time and headaches a big motivation with StageOne 2?

Robin Reumers: "Yes. That's been the goal from the start. When we began Leapwing Audio in 2015, we felt there were two types of plugins. There were ones that were very easy to use but didn't sound very good.

They were phasey and very new at that point, and the other ones were supercomplicated, and you needed to go through pages and pages of things to sound good.

"So, our original goal was to make plugins that are easy to use, have a few controls, but under the hood there are a lot of things that we've fine-tuned and considered. So it's easy to make mixes sound better. That was always the original goal.

"With that, we also want to keep innovating - we don't want to just build another regular compressor like everyone else. That's been our focus point in the last eight or nine years almost."

cm: How quickly after v1 did you guys start making StageOne 2?

RR: "It took some time. What we've always known is that when we're building one plugin we're learning for the next one. When we made Center One, a lot of those ideas helped us to build StageOne. Then RootOne helped us with different ideas of how to do things, and getting DynOne 3 out gave us new ideas and that really evolved again into the ideas for StageOne 2. It's always been kind of iterative."