Developer spotlight: LANDR
Walk into LANDR’s Montreal headquarters and a neon sign greets you: We Work for Musicians. It is the motto of a team of engineers, marketers, product specialists and — above all — music makers, who turned a frustration with mastering into a whole set of tools for producers.
This is the story of how LANDR started, why its FX Suite has three knobs per plugin, and what that philosophy of simplification is for.
In this series we lift the lid on the creators behind the software on MuseHub — the philosophy and stories behind the tools and the people who made them.
Get ready to LANDR
In the world of music tools, the invention story usually follows a well-worn path: a producer hits a wall, wishes for something that does not exist, and builds it. That is how LANDR began in 2014, by turning the simple idea of a better way to master a mix into a service musicians rely on.
Justin and Thomas, LANDR’s founders, wanted to solve one problem. Mastering — the final technical step before a record is released — was a mystery to most producers. Top mastering studios owned rare hardware costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and engineers with “golden ears” turned unmarked dials in darkened rooms.
LANDR’s Education Lead Anthony Albanese remembers the other side of it: “My first time mixing an album was a process, and not an enjoyable one. I was in no way a professional. During the mixing process, you’d find me scouring the web for answers every 5 minutes.”
“So the technology behind LANDR mastering was developed by a team of forward-thinking musicians and technologists at Queen Mary University of London in the early 2000s. The first iteration was launched as MixGenius by Justin Evans, Stuart Mansbridge, and Pascal Pilon,” explains Daniel Rowland.
From there LANDR grew from an AI mastering service into tools for every stage of the creative process. “We now offer creators samples, plugins, AI mastering, collaboration tools, distribution and interactive courses.”
The LANDR mission has always been: ‘empower musicians to create and get heard.’ This mission has naturally drawn musicians to the company. Through the ranks — from devs to marketing to support — the vast majority of the LANDR team are musicians.
The FX Suite
No product captures the philosophy of simplification better than the LANDR FX Suite, available on MuseHub as five plugins: Voice, Beats, Bass, Acoustic and Electric.
The idea is about attention. When you are in a creative flow you want to stay there, and a plugin with forty parameters pulls you out of it. So each LANDR FX plugin exposes three controls and does the detailed processing behind them.
“When we created LANDR FX Suite, the goal was simple — to give music makers simple, effective, one-knob plugins to make their creative process smoother and better,” explains Daniel. “The LANDR community told us they wanted simple effects that would give them the power to enhance the quality and character of individual aspects of their mix. That’s why we created LANDR Electric, Bass, Beats, Vocals and Acoustic — five, easy-to-use tools that open up a world of sonic possibilities for every aspect of a common mix.”
Each plugin is built for one source — a vocal, a drum bus, a bass, an acoustic or electric guitar — so its three controls can be tuned to what that source usually needs, rather than being a general-purpose tool you have to configure first.
In some ways they are “anti-plugins” — the processing that would normally be a bewildering array of technical details happens behind the scenes.
Daniel Rowland — audio engineer, producer and one of LANDR’s guiding creative forces — has folded the FX Suite into his own toolkit. His credits, as LANDR lists them, include film work on John Wick, Pixar, Seal and Star Wars projects and collaborations with artists including Ugly God, Wiz Khalifa, Lil Yachty, Ty Dolla $ign, Panic! at the Disco, Vanessa Hudgens, Natasha Bedingfield and Weezer.
“They add a whole new dimension to the production and editing process. The flow is simple — when it’s time to bring depth, space and character to the specific elements of the mix, fire up your LANDR FX plugins right in your DAW of choice (everything from Audacity to Pro Tools is supported) and breathe new life into your track.”
From a small team of producers, LANDR has become a broad musical resource. What is next? “We’re staying tight-lipped on this one for the time being. But stay tuned because we have a few BIG announcements in the works that we’re super excited about!”
Next steps
LANDR FX plugins are effects in the classic sense — EQ, compression, saturation and space, tuned per source. If you want to understand what they do under the three knobs, what audio compression is and the principles of EQ are the place to start; the best mixing plugins puts them alongside the alternatives. Get the FX Suite and the rest of the catalog in one place — download MuseHub free.