Nail the take, not the edit.

I went back and forth for a long time on whether to host plugins at all. The case against is not a technical one: it is that most of us are reaching for the same handful of processors, and you can hear it. Everything is converging on a sound, and a lot of what gets called production now is repair work carried out on a take that was not good enough.

The old studios — the ones that made the records I keep going back to — did not work that way. The sound was made in the room, and then it was captured. If the take was not right you played it again. Nobody spent the evening fixing one.

So plugins are in, because a recorder that cannot take the instruments and processors you already own is a recorder you cannot work in. But nothing here is arranged around them. There is no built-in processing, nothing on screen suggesting a chain, and no step between pressing record and hearing what you actually played.

This is the same argument, in the place it costs the most to hold.

An instrument you play from a keyboard is recorded the way a microphone is: as audio, on its own track, as you played it. Nothing stores a note. There is no piano roll, nothing to quantise, and no dragging a phrase four milliseconds to the right next week — because next week you will not be able to tell whether it was wrong or whether it was yours.

Play it a few times. Get it right. Keep the one that is right. Some people will dislike that, and I would rather they dislike a decision I made on purpose than discover a limitation I was hoping they would not notice.

Once the backbone was there I started asking what else I had been missing, and the first answer came from a four-track I used to own. Turning the reel over.

Every program will reverse a clip for you. You select a region, you wait, and you get a file that plays backwards — and then you play along to a session still running forwards. That is not the same thing at all. What the records I love have on them is somebody performing into a tape that was already backwards, hearing the whole thing the wrong way round and answering it.

So one key turns the whole session over, and you can record against it. There is nothing to render and nothing to wait for, because nothing has been made — the flip is a way of looking at the session, and turning it over twice puts you exactly where you started.

Finding a recorder with all of the above was one problem. Running anything good on Linux was a different one, and honestly the larger of the two.

So this is a native PipeWire client and a native JACK client, written against each API rather than through a layer that translates somebody else’s idea of audio into this one. Linux is not a build target that got bolted on at the end; it is the machine the program was written on and the hardware every figure on this site was measured against.

At that point there was nothing left to go looking for. I got to building.

Partly because it is more fun that way. When money is not part of a decision you end up building the thing you actually wanted rather than the thing that would sell, and every choice on this page is one I would have talked myself out of otherwise.

Mostly because of what Revolutions Records is for. The label exists to make people’s lives better, and the most direct version of that is a tool the people making things can pick up and use without working out whether they can afford to. The thing standing between an idea and a recording is almost never talent — it is setup, licences, and an hour of configuration before the first take.

zxc.studio stays free, and no part of it is held back for a paid version — there is no paid version to hold anything back for. If it turns out to be useful to you and you want development to keep going, there will be a page for that: donations, and the other ways of helping that are not money.

That page is not up yet, and this sentence is here instead of a button that goes nowhere. Until it is, the waitlist is the most useful thing you can do — it is how the first build finds the people it was written for.

A recorder built by people who release records is a different proposition from one built by a software company, and this is the whole of that claim: revolutionsrecords.com.