Black Octopus Sound is hiring a VST Developer - read for details!

[toby]

Black Octopus Sound is hiring!

Black Octopus Sound is a rapidly growing sound design company with a large & loyal customer base and we are looking to expand into the world of VST plugins! Ideally this person could see themselves working with us long term and building a long and successful career together.
We have a several designs ready to go, but also creative input from the programmer for future designs will also be appreciated & considered.

We will collect all applicants and review them over the course of a month or two. The first project will be a flagship Synthesizer/Sampler instrument. The selected candidates will then be asked to sign an NDA and review a design (GUI Mockup & rough manual) and provide a rough estimate of development time.

The Ideal candidate

• Senior DSP Programmer / VST Developer
• High level DSP Coding skills required
• Minimum 5 years’ experience with DSP (synthesizers, samplers, DSP effects)
• Experience in modeling and recreating high quality analog filters
• Experience in creating unique digital filters (Comb Filter, Phaser, Creative Notch filters)
• Experience in creating VST Instruments capable of sample playback with multisampled instruments
• Experience and knowledge of various types of synthesis (Subtractive, FM, Wavetable, Granular, Additive)
• Experience creating envelope graphs (Multipoint MSEG envelopes, LFO)
• Experience creating various types of DSP effects (Distortion, EQ, Compressor, Reverb, Flanger, Phaser, Delay, & other various creative FX)
• VST2 / VST3 a must - AU / AAX a bonus
• Knowledge of MPE
• Passion for Electronic music
• Passion for bringing new and Innovative Ideas to light
• Excellent problem solving skills
• Respective attitude, good communication skills, excellent organizational skills, high attention to details

COMPENSATION:
Compensation will be negotiable upon getting rough estimate of project completion time. We would like to come up something that feels fair and promotes longevity between both the developer & company.
Options include: Upfront Fee, Ongoing payment during development time. Royalty options are available upon providing ongoing support & updates for product. Our customers are hungry for an official plugin and this could lead to some generous compensation.

Please submit resume, cover letter, & examples of previous work to contact@blackoctopus-sound.com. Subject line: RE Hiring notice

[otristan]

You do know that you are asking for something that usually takes multiple years to develop right ?

[Aleksey Vaneev]

Judging by the current state of art, salaries, it would cost $150k per year for a small team to develop, maybe in the course of 2-3 years. Not worth it with the current market state, even Waves after briefly touching the VST instrument market did not go further.

I mean a state of the art VST instrument coded from scratch. It all depends on the complexity-e.g. a sampler without much interconnections and modulation framework, with crude non-refined FX, may be produced faster and cheaper. Still, supporting a lot of plugin formats and display resolutions requires quite some work beside sampler itself.

[toby]

You do know that you are asking for something that usually takes multiple years to develop right ?

Yes

[toby]

Judging by the current state of art, salaries, it would cost $150k per year for a small team to develop, maybe in the course of 2-3 years. Not worth it with the current market state, even Waves after briefly touching the VST instrument market did not go further.

I mean a state of the art VST instrument coded from scratch. It all depends on the complexity-e.g. a sampler without much interconnections and modulation framework, with crude non-refined FX, may be produced faster and cheaper. Still, supporting a lot of plugin formats and display resolutions requires quite some work beside sampler itself.

Thanks for your input, although the mood I am getting from your post is "too much work, not worth it to develop VST instruments these days" - then why are companies developing instruments still? Some of them must be making money.

Coding from scratch might not have to be done, perhaps a developer has some existing codebase they can re-use to jumpstart development? We can also look at the options of licensing code (Filters, Reverb, Distortions etc..) Although if coding the whole thing from scratch has to be done, it is an investment I am willing to explore.

[Aleksey Vaneev]

Thanks for your input, although the mood I am getting from your post is "too much work, not worth it to develop VST instruments these days" - then why are companies developing instruments still? Some of them must be making money.

Coding from scratch might not have to be done, perhaps a developer has some existing codebase they can re-use to jumpstart development? We can also look at the options of licensing code (Filters, Reverb, Distortions etc..) Although if coding the whole thing from scratch has to be done, it is an investment I am willing to explore.

It's just my attitude, probably not to consider. I'm just trying to envision if I wanted to enter this market and what it could look like. Taking into account you already sell presets for established instrument plugins, you expect a state of the art plugin, and that's where things are complex/unpredictable from development cost/time (design something like Serum or Reaktor, state of the art oscillators and filters given details on them is proprietary and not freely available). Given you have staff for UI design and preset design the development costs may be reduced. My estimation is for a completely new team work, also you may need 2 programmers for the work to not take too much time. Not sure you can find someone with passion to make work for royalties nowadays. E.g. I've tried to purchase filter code from some parties, and it was expensive, just the freaking filters, because it's a know-how.

I think those with solid codebase already released their own instrument plugins, maybe you could simply license/purchase and repurpose/redesign an existing instrument plugin, this path certainly has limitations, but is a faster path to market.

[stratum]

If this synth is not going to be a market leader I don't think it will take 2-3 years to develop. Whether it makes sense to develop 'just another synth' just because it will be slightly different is what you should be considering. Perhaps it does.

[Aleksey Vaneev]

If this synth is not going to be a market leader I don't think it will take 2-3 years to develop. Whether it makes sense to develop 'just another synth' just because it will be slightly different is what you should be considering. Perhaps it does.

It's very likely that the first version of an "average" instrument plugin may be produced much faster than that, but the talk was about overall budget for development - development, bug fixes and refinement takes more time usually, v1.1, v1.2 etc, and depending on the plugin's userbase size may take quite some time. Then if you expect a single programmer to give you all the filters and oscillators worth its pricetag, you have to keep programmer on payroll so that he can better these in further versions (not guaranteed, though). Programmers provably worth their wage already sell plugins I suppose.

[toby]

It's just my attitude, probably not to consider.

Again appreciate all your input here, it is always very important to weight out all the possible negatives and be realistic with expectations for a project of this scope.

Some more info to fill in some points from your post:

UI is already designed (2nd draft phase), We are currently in the process of having a 3D modeler give it a more polished look, and will be hiring a very skilled UI designer for the final interface. I am expecting to have to rework it a few times depending on if any features have to be cut, re-thought, or to be fit in with the developers requirements. Having a really polished UI at this stage is only really important for selling the idea to the developers and get them excited about the project, as if they don't see the possibility of success with the instrument then clearly I have failed and will need to take this whole thing back to the drawing board.

Sound design & presets will easily be taken care of & will be one of the strongest selling points, we have a team of approximately 40 of some of the best artists in the world (biased opinion here of course!) But the numbers don't lie and our preset packs are some of the top selling on Splice & Loopmasters (+ regular beatport top 10 artists , youtube videos with millions+ views) so the Instrument would launch with an incredibly solid patch library & marketing video.

We are definitely interested in looking at existing designs from developers, to see if they could potentially be reworked into our vision.

So many synths come to market which do not offer anything new, or are very sterile in design and lack character & soul. In my 20 years of producing I have been compiling my ideas of what I think is missing (mainly in terms of design & layout)

If this synth is not going to be a market leader I don't think it will take 2-3 years to develop. Whether it makes sense to develop 'just another synth' just because it will be slightly different is what you should be considering. Perhaps it does.

The goal here is to be a market leader, I don't see a point in bringing "just another synth" to market as there is more than enough to choose from in this department.

The hardest part here is indeed finding a really good talented developer(s) that hasn't already started their own company, or already wrapped up in their own projects.