MBP #189 Dom Smart

Today I'm talking with Dom Smart, who makes music as Neurodriver and runs the plugin company Devious Machines. He spent about fifteen years doing sound design for games, a lot of it on the Harry Potter games at Electronic Arts, and back in the day he was half of the breaks act Far Too Loud. Then he taught himself C plus plus, teamed up with his business partner Jim Credland, and they made Texture and Infiltrator. I still use Texture all the time. He also just finished a new Neurodriver album after a long break from music, and it's on Alpaka Musik.

We get into the granular car engine stuff they were doing at E A, which is kind of insane, and how Texture started as a techno trick with gated white noise under the hi hats. He also tries to explain the Fourier transform to me, which I still don't fully get. We talk about why pretty much only audio software uses knobs, saying no to power user features so a plugin stays easy to use, the sample based instrument they've been working on for ages, and how he's coding with Claude now.

And then it turns into a bigger thing about AI and art, and why prompting code feels totally different to him than prompting a song.

Hope you dig it.

Dom Smart Links

https://deviousmachines.com/

https://www.facebook.com/DeviousMachines/

https://www.instagram.com/deviousmachines/

https://soundcloud.com/neurodriver

Mr. Bill's Links