Flexiana Atelier
Flexiana Atelier
In the Atelier, Flexiana makes software for the stage and the studio. There are two products so far: a live-performance instrument and a kick-drum synth. They are made by people who play out, and who have stood behind a laptop at two in the morning with no undo button. That night is the design brief for both of them.
A distinct branch of our work · proprietary products · macOS-first
The philosophy
Why we make instruments
We built these because we were behind the decks ourselves and nothing under our hands felt right. The decisions in them come back to one thing: keeping the software out of the way while you play, so that the room hears the track and you, and not somebody operating a laptop.
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Made for the moment
A set is something you shape while it plays, and the engineering underneath exists so that you can stop thinking about the laptop by the second track.
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Tested like a paid gig
Before a release ships we run it as a paid gig would run, for hours, recorder armed, plugin chains on every track, watching for a single dropped sample.
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Yours to keep
A perpetual licence and plain-text project files. What you make is readable today and readable in twenty years, on hardware we do not control.
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Serious about the sound
We spend our time on latency, headroom and how a kick translates on a club system, because those are the three things a performer notices before anything else.
LiveSet
A studio DAW will let you play live, and it shows. LiveSet is built the other way round: you compose the set in it, then perform that same set without exporting anything. Build it from synth and sample tracks, wire scenes that launch on the bar, and change any part of it while the room is listening. Sweep a filter, drop the kick, chain the next transition so that it fires itself.
Three ways to work
Compose the material, prepare how it runs, perform it live. One instrument, three modes.
Built to hold the night
A Rust engine built for the deadline. Once it starts, the audio thread does not allocate and makes no system call, and a bad value is muted instead of blasted at the room. Low latency at small buffer sizes.
Your rig, recognised
Up to four editable decks, a DJ mixer with crossfader and cue, and MIDI mapping that knows around 69 controllers on sight — plug one in and the pads and knobs already do something. No Learn step.
MrKicksy
A kick made by layering four samples is four phase relationships you did not choose. MrKicksy builds the low end from parts instead: a sub, a click, a body and an optional sample layer, five rumble engines running in parallel, and a mastering chain voiced for kick drums and for nothing else. Thirty hand-tuned factory presets get you to the genre you are aiming at, and each one is the same machine set thirty ways.
Four sound sources
Sub, click, body and an optional sample layer — each with its own envelope, drive and filter.
Five rumble engines
Convolution, reverb tail, resonator, feedback delay and filtered distortion, blended together.
A kick-aware master chain
Dynamic EQ that knows where the fundamental lives, a sub-aware limiter and a true-peak ceiling.
VST3, CLAP, standalone
Runs in any modern DAW that takes VST3 or CLAP, with a standalone studio editor.
Made by Flexiana
Proprietary products, made by people who play out.
LiveSet and MrKicksy are held to the same standard as everything else Flexiana builds. Each product page says what ships today and what is still on the roadmap, in the same place and the same size of type.
From the journal
From the journal
Translation filters, hearing the kick on a phone before you bounce
Your kick sounds great on monitors. It dies on a phone. By the time you find out, the track is released. We added five system emulations to MrKicksy because we got tired of finding out the hard way.
The vinyl brake, why soft stop is 250 milliseconds
When you press stop on LiveSet, the master takes a quarter-second to fall to zero with a saturator over the top. Not because it sounds nice, because a cliff stop sounds wrong.
What shipped in 0.5, modulators, stems, the long edit
v0.5 is the credibility build, modulators, WSOLA pitch-shift, stem separation, per-scene tempo ramps, and a top-to-bottom polish pass on the four-persona interface.
From the Atelier
Where to go next
LiveSet and MrKicksy each have a page here and a home at liveset.app. If it is the software company you came for, the rest of this site is that.