Turn Up
Plaqueboymax, Rakai & BunnaB
Added to Fortnite, set off trends on TikTok and Instagram, and passed 8 million streams.
Watch ↗200K+artists on Cryo Mix
100countries
8 yrsas an audio engineer
638production credits
When I joined, Cryo Mix was a three-step uploader. It's now a full mixing and mastering environment, in the browser and inside your DAW.
"Sexy" by Yang
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An artist says "make it hit harder in the car." My job is working with engineering until that becomes DSP moves that hold up.
A professional mix runs $300 to $500 a track and takes days. Most independent artists can't afford that, so they release music they aren't proud of. I watched it happen for years as an engineer.
Cryo Mix doesn't generate anything. You tell Nova what you want in plain English, and it mixes the song you already made. It never trains on anyone's audio.
We're four people, so the job has never been one lane. Craig owns the audio engine and Jannik runs operations. I run product direction, growth and go-to-market.
Product and audio
- Tore v1 down into the plan for a multi-stage DAW.
- Designed the core v2 tools. Led UX on Delta A/B, the stem eraser, clipping and alignment.
- Crash-tested and built 10 new modules, including LA-2A and 1176 emulators, Air, and Smooth, a dynamic resonance compressor.
- Tuned 100+ instrument and vocal presets across four genres.
- Signed off every vocal plugin, mastering plugin and web tool through v3, by ear.
Nova
- Built the RAG system and vector database it answers from.
- Lined up producer language with audio using CLAP embeddings.
- Wrote the [APPLIED] protocol that stopped it reprocessing old requests.
- Built its subculture database: how different scenes describe sound.
- Built its failure analysis and the testing engine that keeps improving it.
- Wrote the Nova manual.
Growth and go-to-market
- Run the whole funnel: Meta ads, creators, SEO, partnerships.
- Built the creator program, from recruitment to affiliate tracking.
- Built our Meta pixel tracking.
- Write, script, film, record, edit and animate everything we publish.
- Demoed in studios and academies in Korea, Amsterdam and Lisbon.
Mix & Master Online, v3
The new web app. No render times, pitch editing built in, and it runs offline too.
WebOverhear
Hear your mix in a car, on a home stereo or in a treated studio before you release it.
NewStudio Mode
A full channel strip on every track, for when you want your hands on the mix.
NewPlug-ins
Channel, Nova and Master, inside your DAW.
BetaMeta's algorithm learns from whatever event you hand it. Purchases were measured well but happened too rarely to teach it anything. Registrations were plentiful and barely tied to revenue. The first project sits between the two. It happens often, and it's the step people take before they pay.
So each campaign is one broad ad set aimed at that event, carrying a handful of ads that look nothing alike. Near-identical ads get treated as one ad and throttled.
I run a roster of creators who post about mixing on Instagram and TikTok. After roughly 70 videos I went through the view data. Hooks that make a claim with a number in it, written as a full sentence, beat everything else. Endorsements and slogans went nowhere.
Conversion followed one thing: whether the video ended with a call to action that worked. When a creator's numbers are bad we change the format or the deal. Warming up a creator takes too long to throw one away.
India was our second-biggest traffic source and barely converted. Users finished the whole flow, then hit a wall at payment they couldn't explain. The cause was the RBI e-mandate rule, which was silently blocking card subscriptions at confirmation.
We moved to Paddle and added UPI AutoPay with local pricing. The product didn't change.
Language and audio live in different vector spaces. I used CLAP (contrastive language-audio pretraining) to put them in one, so the words "warm guitar" and a warm guitar recording land next to each other.
I analyzed 4,793 embeddings, found the producer phrases with no audio neighbors, and patched the gaps. I also wrote the [APPLIED] marker protocol that stopped Nova from reprocessing requests it had already handled.
CRITICAL: HISTORY HANDLING
// [APPLIED] = context resolved. Do not re-process.
If user says 'louder' after [APPLIED],
respond ONLY to the new request.
PARAMETERS: width, EQ, loudness, saturation
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Elsewhere
Tuttii let people remix songs inside the app, which only works if the original artists get paid. Our team mapped a DDEX pipeline that paid artists and collaborators, worked through label negotiations, and closed the SoundCloud deal.
On the marketing side I ran influencer outreach and worked on onboarding.
342Kinfluencer reach
+53%onboarding completion
+65%MAU
I ran marketing from zero and storyboarded, voiced and edited every video. The first 72 hours brought 175,000 impressions.
I also built the Selenium pipeline that surfaced hidden sales across retailers, on MongoDB and Pinecone. Hanger was acquired before its YC application closed.
1.7M+TikTok views
629Ktop video
175Kimpressions, 72 hrs
I started it as Bay Area Collective, with no budget, to get independent artists engineering they couldn't pay for. It became a 501(c)(3) in 2021, and it's where most of my credits come from.
1,600+projects
4countries
Side B
I've been making music since I was 7 and engineering it for eight years.
I started out recording artists in India and Oakland, and have since engineered, produced or played on records in hip-hop, R&B, jazz, alternative and Bollytekk.
I release music as PRADI, play drums and keys in Solace, and teach mixing as wadimixes.
513+artists
8M+streams, Turn Up
KSCUproduction director
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Credits
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Everything from the first note to the master. I perform as PRADI in the video, shot in San Francisco's Chinatown.
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Cinematic low end and textured percussion, made with Rith and Itihas.
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Art direction, with the Solace Collective team
Whateva
Midwxst, Ezcodylee & Ninexteen
All three artists have since broken out in the underground rap scene.
Watch ↗
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Bollytekk
South Asian classical instruments run through underground electronic production.
Heavy synths, deep low end, a lot of space in the percussion. I'm a member of the collective and mixed and mastered Yuga.
Yuga on YouTube ↗
As seen on DOST
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Solace
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