Interface
Following industry-wide acclaim for its roster of top quality effects plugins, Minimal Audio finally brought a delicious synth to the table in 2023. But what makes Current so different to the other softsynth offerings out there? We caught up with the company’s head honchos to dig in a little deeper…
Minimal Audio
Jacob Penn (Founder/CEO)
Ben Wyss (Co-Founder/Head of Audio R&D)
Nathan Wexler (Co-Founder/Head of Sound Design)
cm: Hi guys, can you give us an overview of how Current differs and expands on what you’d typically expect from a software synth?
Jacob (Jake): “We’ve all been using synths since we were kids. Typically you look at synths and they make sounds right? That’s been pretty normal since the inception of them, but things are changing and there’s more capability. There’s more processing power and there’s also just kind of a vision we have for the product and for the company that was there from the outset.
“The idea was to build an ecosystem around a single product. We knew from the start that we wanted to make a synth with effects built into it, but we didn’t want to have normal stock effects with three knobs that you can’t really dial in your sounds with. We find that it makes it really hard to make a final patch in the synth when things are constrained to that level. So we knew we wanted to build a collection of plugins that all formulate into one larger parent plugin.
“So when you open up Current you’ll see that all of our plugins are inside it, and all of the plugins originated from inside Current and were taken out to be released separately. We’ve been building Current since the beginning but we haven’t wanted to reveal that. We’re self-funded and we’re boot-strapped, so we particularly like the idea of the ecosystem concept, because it makes a really nice workflow going from product-to-product.
“It’s been a mix of ‘what can we do technically?’ and ‘what can we do to make a really kick-ass product as well as fulfil our vision of making a very, very good synthesiser?’. The basis for that vision for it made us approach the design of it differently to how others have probably designed their synths.
“The other part of it is that we want to continue to develop the synth for the rest of our careers. We really want this to be the product that we just get to make better and better every year. How do we keep stuff fresh? Well you might download a softsynth but if you don’t use them for a while, you might rinse the presets and then they fall by the wayside. We wanted to add the cloud connectivity aspect that’s widespread right now. But samples aren’t everything. If you had a preset that created sample-quality sounds in the synth itself, then distributing presets is a lot more intriguing than distributing ind
