Ho ho ho! We are very happy to announce that our friends at Klevgränd produktion are giving away their lovely SquashIt multi-band distortion effect as an exclusive freebie for all BPB readers this Christmas (the offer ends on December 26th)!

SquashIt is great sounding multi-band distortion effect available as a VST and AU plugin for Windows and Mac OS based host applications. The plugin splits the incoming audio signal into three frequency bands which can be distorted separately. The workflow-oriented user interface makes SquashIt tons of fun to use, as you can see and hear in our demo video below.

The plugin is normally priced at $7.99, but you can download it for free via BPB until December 26th, thanks to the awesome team at Klevgränd produktion! Scroll below to grab SquashIt for free and also check out our interview with the Klevgränd, who keep pushing the design and UI boundaries of music making software with every new release. Also check out our review of their Enkl synthesizer and visit their website to grab their products at a 60% discount during the Christmas sale!

The Interview

Tomislav: Hi guys, thank you so much for providing such an awesome gift for BPB readers! Klevgränd produktion products have already been featured on our website several times in the past, but can you tell us a bit more about your company? How many people are on the team, what brought you together and how did you first get into developing plug-ins?

Klevgränd: Hi Tomislav! Klevgränd was started as a kind of freelancer collective about seven years ago. We studied music and media production at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm together and decided to share an office/studio space. We mainly produced web, music and film back then. At that time, we were six person team. This led to a lot of collaborations and after a few years we decided to start a business together. Now we’re still six owners, but we also have a network of consultants and freelancers, and if we count them all in I guess there would be about fifteen of us. The core of products development (our plug-ins and apps) consists of the four of us though.

During the years, we developed a few different audio engines for interactive music, which ended up in a middleware product called AudioCue. Inside AudioCue, there is quite a lot of real time DSP happening and some of the internal effects turned out sounding really nice. We all fell a little bit in love with one of the effects (a pretty weird distortion effect) and wanted to be able to use it in our DAWs. At the same time, we really wanted to explore (and develop stuff for) the iOS music community and all this ended up in SquashIt for iOS and as a Audio Unit. At the time, we had no intentions of doing more plug-ins or apps, we just made that one for fun.

But suddenly, we got users. And most of them seemed to like what we were doing! We just had to create another one. And another one…

Tomislav: Being a non-programmer myself, I’m always interested in knowing how the developers come up with the ideas for new plugins. Do you simply build something that you want to use yourself in your own music production endeavors, but it simply isn’t available out there yet? Or do you listen to the pulse of the community and try to come up with something that everyone out there will want to use?

Klevgränd: Frankly, it’s somewhere in between. We always try to make something unique (interface-wise and/or DSP-wise) with focus on making a creative workflow for the user. Our plug-ins and apps should sound good and be fun to use!

Tomislav: Your instruments and effects are quite a unique offering on today’s plugin market in terms of design. I’m guessing that this has a lot to do with the fact that your products are available as iOS apps, as well as Windows/Mac OS plugins. What comes first during the development process, the mobile app or the desktop plugin?

Klevgränd: It often starts with an idea. It can be a DSP thing, a user interface thing, or both. Then someone starts doing a visual mockup and someone starts with the DSP. There is a lot of development iteration going on during this process and sometimes the idea is unrecognised when we’re done. Then we make a mockup app (sometimes on iOS, sometimes as a stand alone desktop app and sometimes as a plug-in) and everyone tests it and gives feedback. After that step, we start creating the ”real” version, which most of the time means we put the final graphics in place, make sure everything works as expected, tweak some parameters, etc. What platform we target first differs, but lately we tend to start with the desktop plugin since its easier for everyone to test.

Tomislav: Do you see the touchscreen monitors on desktop computers as something that will go mainstream with near future? How will it affect the music making / audio production scene, in your opinion? Will touchscreen laptops simply fully replace desktop computers at some point?

Klevgränd: Don’t know :) Touch is really cool, but you lose precision. A lot of small buttons and knobs on a small area is hell on a touch screen. A pen, like the iPad Pro supports, fixes those problems though…

Tomislav: Without giving away any top secrets, what are (some) of your plans for 2016? :)

Klevgränd: Out next project actually is top secret and we can’t say anything about it… :) But we’ll hopefully get the time to update a few of our existing products as well (we have some features for several of our existing plugins that we really want to add).

Tomislav: Thanks again for the giving away SquashIt on BPB and I’m very much looking forward to more Klevgränd produktion software in the future!

Klevgränd: Thanks! We’re really proud to be featured on your blog!

The Giveaway

To download your free copy of SquashIt, simply enter the coupon code BPB15 in the form below (click the GET IT NOW button, paste the coupon in the CODE field and hit APPLY). The price will be reduced to $0 and you will be able complete the checkout process completely free of charge. The coupon code will expire on December 26th, so be quick and let your friends know about this!

UPDATE: The free download offer has expired.

Many thanks to our friends at Klevgränd produktion for helping us bring this awesome Christmas gift to you guys. And of course, thank you all for reading BPB. Merry Christmas! :)