Our story
Solving Real World Problems.
Kiln started in a rehearsal space. We are a heavy shoegaze rock band, and record our rehearsals on the gear we can afford. The songs felt huge in our ears. Listening back in Logic, they came back quiet and cloudy, and turning them up only made it worse. The drums were in every microphone, and every gate we used chopped the vocal unnaturally.
The professional tools we used could fix it, but each one came with a wall of controls, and the session usually ended before the mix did. Enter Kiln; one job each, a few big controls, and sound tuned for the music we actually make.
Then we went looking for what other people struggle with. We read through published surveys of hundreds of producers, mastering engineers' lists of what goes wrong, and years of forum threads. The same problems came up again and again: in those surveys, most people finish fewer than half the songs they start, mixes that sound great at home fall apart on a phone, low end turns to mud, vocals won't sit, drums bleed into everything, tired ears make bad calls. Every Kiln plugin solves one of those problems, and that mindset becomes the roadmap as well. As new challenges arise, we will work to provide simple, approachable solutions.
Why pottery? Making a record and making pottery are the same kind of work - rough material, shaped by hand, fixed where it cracks, then fired until it holds. So every Kiln plugin is named after a potter's tool or technique, and each one's page talks about the inspiration for the name.