Smash Happy Audio is a small, independent plugin studio in Kamloops, British Columbia. We build new tools that solve real problems for people who make records, and every one is tested on real music before it ships.
BerkleeIt started on a back porch with a boombox, pointed at the sky whenever a thunderstorm rolled in. I wasn't making anything. I just wanted to hear the storm again, and a recording turned out to be a way of keeping it. By 2003 that turned into a Radioshack computer mic plugged into Windows Sound Recorder, taping my band's first demos in a jam room. Then years on the road: producing bands, running front-of-house on tours across Canada, working alongside people whose records still shape how I listen today.
Then Berklee Online: a Master Certificate in Music Business and Technology and a Specialist Certificate in Producing Music with Logic, plus a scholarship named for Ed Cherney, the Grammy-winning mixer who worked with Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, and The Rolling Stones. After that came Smash Happy Recordings, a commercial studio in Kamloops, BC that my team and I designed and built by hand.
I've also worked with computers for 25 years, with a background in systems and network administration, which is where I learned to treat software as something that has to hold up: monitored, tested, and made to fail on purpose before it goes anywhere near a real session.
I've been mixing and mastering since 2009. Mastering especially has always been the passion. Making a record has its own magic, but the final shape of how a song goes out into the world is the part I love most.
Smash Happy Audio is the next step. Everything that ear training taught us, signal flow, harmonic behavior, what actually holds up on real music, goes into plugins instead of staying locked behind a studio door. We build these the way we build a mix: by feel, tested against real music, until each one earns its place. That's slower than a company with a release schedule to hit. It's also why every plugin here has been tested on real music before it ever shipped.
These days I'm a family guy, and life is busy in the best way. Smash Happy Audio is where I put my evenings and weekends: something I'm still passionate about, built around the people I love. It's also how I'm helping keep Smash Happy Recordings going, and why $5 from every purchase goes to BC Children's Hospital Foundation.
It starts with a gap. Then every tool follows the same loop.
We love analog gear, and there's real character in it. But analog drifts. A bias wanders, a capacitor falls out of spec, a threshold sits off calibration for years, and you compensate around it until the compensation becomes your taste. Getting gear recalibrated costs real money, and even then it can come back missing some of the magic it had before. There's an inconsistency in that world. A plugin can be nulled against a reference, pushed to settings it was never built for, and recalled exactly, every time. The gap between plugins and analog keeps narrowing, even more so these days. On a master the question is less "is it analog" and more "does it sound right".
We want Smash Happy Audio to be a genuinely great, independent plugin company, built in British Columbia, plugin by plugin, priced fairly and designed by people who actually reach for the tools on real work. The market is about to flood with user-made plugins, and we intend to be a company that still stands out when it does: tools with a point of view, measured and listened to. We've put more than a year and over a thousand hours into this so far. We also like getting creative with our own engines, and now and then something ships purely because it's a flavor we wanted to exist.
No pop-ups pushing discount codes, no wheels to spin for 10% off, no email gate in front of a price. You'll always see what something costs, and it'll cost that tomorrow too.
We'd rather be in the comments and the inbox talking shop with the people actually using these than hiding behind a storefront.
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Ten mastering tools, one console to run them in, and a pipeline of new tools already in development.
