Atelier journal
The Atelier journal
Design diaries, release notes and the reasoning behind LiveSet and MrKicksy, why a soft stop takes 250 milliseconds, why the kick gets a whole instrument, and what it takes to make five millisecond latency mean something under your hands.
- Entries
- 8
- On LiveSet
- 5
- On MrKicksy
- 3
- Written by
- Jiri Knesl
Why we publish it
Why we write it
A feature list tells you what an instrument does. It does not tell you why it does it that way, and you need the reasons in order to trust it, or to argue with us about it.
Every entry here takes one decision and shows the work: the constraint we hit, the options we weighed, what we chose, and what we gave up to choose it. Several of them argue against a position we held ourselves eighteen months earlier.
It is the same habit as the research notes and the lab we publish on the client side of the company: show the reasoning, including the parts that did not work out, and let people judge it for themselves.
What is in here
Three kinds of entry
Design diaries
6One decision, and the argument behind it. Why the soft stop takes 250 milliseconds. Why the kick gets a whole instrument of its own. Why there is no MIDI Learn wizard. These are the notes we would want to read about somebody else’s instrument.
Release notes
1What went into a build, written for someone who wants to know what changed, which a changelog never tells you. Named features, the reasoning that put them in that order, and the parts that took far longer than they should have.
How to
1Practical pieces about playing music, what to prepare for a first basement gig, how to survive a sound system you have never heard. Useful whether or not you own anything of ours.
Every entry
- Read →MrKicksy · 18 June 2026 design diarymrkicksy
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.
- Read →LiveSet · 12 June 2026 design diaryaudio
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.
- Read →LiveSet · 8 June 2026 release notes
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.
- Read →MrKicksy · 2 June 2026 design diarymrkicksy
Why a whole instrument for the kick
The kick is one drum on a typical electronic track. We wrote a whole instrument around it. Here's the case, made by someone who spent eighteen months on the wrong side of this argument.
- Read →LiveSet · 28 May 2026 design diarycontrollers
No Learn step, what auto-recognise means
Plug in a Maschine, an MPC, a Push, an APC, a Launchpad, they all light up the moment USB clicks in. Here's what's going on under the hood, and why we refuse to add a 'MIDI Learn' wizard.
- Read →MrKicksy · 22 May 2026 design diarymrkicksy
Why five rumble engines, and not one
Most kick synths run one rumble generator. MrKicksy runs five in parallel. Here's the case for blending instead of choosing, and what each engine contributes to a kick.
- Read →LiveSet · 14 May 2026 design diaryaudio
What five milliseconds feels like
We say LiveSet hits sub-5 ms round-trip at buffer 64. That number is meaningless until you've felt the difference between 5 ms and 20 ms with a pair of drum pads under your hands.
- Read →LiveSet · 22 April 2026 how tolive
Your first basement gig
You've booked your first gig: a 150-cap basement, a sound system you've never used, a 90-minute slot. Here's what to prepare so the night doesn't break you.
From the Atelier
The instruments the notes are about
The journal follows LiveSet and MrKicksy: a live-performance instrument that keeps the track editable while it plays, and a kick synth with five rumble engines. Start with either, or, if it is the software company you came for, bring us a harder problem.