We talk with Mario about his background in Max for Live, his affinity for MIDI effects and his holistic approach to marketing.
How are you?
Good! I don’t know if you heard, we just had a huge blackout here in Spain. No electricity, no phone, no internet, nothing!
That’s crazy!
An historic event! I was worried I wouldn’t make it on time. I just got electricity and internet five minutes ago!
Ah wow! Did you want to reschedule?
We’re good now. It was crazy, nothing like this has never happened before. I didn’t even have an analog radio. Luckily, my wife came home and brought a new little radio. Everything in the house requires electricity…
Anyway! We’re here!
Yes! So, are you in Barcelona?
Yes. Well, not exactly in Barcelona, in a town called Martorelles, thirty minutes away.
Do you like the city?
Not really… I like the mountains. I like the beach. I like calm, chill vibes, making music…
Ah, you are a musician?
I started playing classical guitar around 8 years old in school. Nothing official. My main background was as a turntablism DJ. Here in Spain, I was Red Bull 3Style champion in 2011. I also competed at the DMC, placing 2nd in Spain. Along the way, I studied piano at a music school.
And you do all the programming for your products?
Yes, I taught myself. For a long time I spent hours trying to make music, but I didn’t always get results, or I didn’t like them. So a lot of the time I found myself spending hours testing plugins, combining them, looking for inspiration, and one thing led to another until I eventually found Max for Live.
When I found Max for Live, my mission in life became programming.
Nice!
I started studying Max for Live with a teacher. And then I built my first devices. I built one, a MIDI melody generator. And I put the device up for free up on Facebook. And I said, “Ok, if you want this device, just share this post/comment and I’ll send it to you for free” and it became extremely popular. A company named Audio Modern wrote me and told me they wanted to sell my devices, and I started working professionally from that point onwards.
I tried out Max for Live a few times, but it never clicked for me. Maybe the problem was that I was a programmer first, so I always wanted to go deeper…
That’s the “problem” with Max for Live. And not, at the same time. You can go low level if you want. But in general, it’s a language itself. C++ is incredibly flexible.
Too flexible [laughs]
[laughs] Yeah, maybe too flexible.
How did you start learning C++?
With the Audio Programmer Tutorials from Joshua. For me it was like playing games, I enjoyed solving them, starting small. I bought a course from a guy…
Yes! I bought his course. I did a lot of courses with Unity and C# programming. I’m really interested in all the different things. You know, in bed, instead of watching a movie or something I’ll put tutorials on.
I know that vibe! Does that mean you also made some games?
I released a free game called Bruc. The purpose was to learn. I did everything, the soundtrack, the 3D models, the animation, the rigging. It was super fun for me. Actually, the logo I use for Mario Nieto World is the character design I made for the game.
I jumped into C++ which was kind of intimidating and later started working for Audio Modern. They had a team of experimental people and I learned a lot with them. The first tool I built, the code was incredibly ugly, but it worked. With the team’s help, I learned a lot about programming patterns, how to structure code, how to make the GUI efficient, the processor, all that stuff.
Harmony Bloom is amazing. I love it. I just used it for 20 minutes before this interview. It totally makes sense that it won the “Most Innovative” KVR award [in 2024].
Thank you.
It’s also really pretty. I like that it’s monochrome. Is visual design important to you?
I believe it’s important for the customer. For me personally, if a plugin does something really well and the interface isn’t amazing, that’s not a dealbreaker. But as a developer, I prioritize making the experience as clear and easy as possible, and also making sure the UI looks balanced, in layout and in color. People generally don’t like spending too much time learning something new.
Designing a UI is hard. It’s really, really hard.
It’s really hard. Often harder than the dsp! [laughs]
Sometimes it is! I spend a lot of time with Figma, adjusting things. Everything is in vector, no pngs.
Ah, me too! All in Figma. Everything vector. The visualizer in the middle of Harmony Bloom — is that animation with juce::Paths? It works great.
Yes, all with juce::Path and juce::Graphics functions. It works great if the repainting is well optimized… although with Harmony Bloom I learned I could still improve. For example, on a large 4K screen, since the interface is scalable, if you make the window really, really big, everything starts to slow down. At least this is the complaint from some Cubase users…
There’s a presentation mode in Harmony Bloom that renders using an OpenGL context, which makes the spiral render a bit more smoothly on large screens.
Marketing-wise you have all of these great demos and videos. Can you talk about how you made them? Did you write scripts?
I was doing my own videos at the beginning but right now I’m working with a guy named Frio Ventus.
He’s a talented guy specializing in orchestral music and soundtracks. He made the last tutorials for Harmony Bloom and Chord Generator and is making a series now.
Because I enjoy it a lot and I think it’s good marketing, I do live music sessions online at least once or twice per week. I’ve done more than 100 streams. But it’s not a tutorial, I don’t speak.
Is there face cam?
No. Just recording my screen. It’s like a jam. 2 hours of music. I never know what will happen.
Is it YouTube or Twitch or?
Just YouTube.
Ah, I’ll sign up to get notified to join sometime.
Say hello in the chat!
Is streaming good as a marketing tool?
I’d say yes. My intention is to reach more people, and streams often get recommended on YouTube to non-subscribed users, so new people who didn’t know my tools usually drop in.
I also have a Discord channel. I usually reply in forums like KVR if someone has questions, so I’m generally available for any user who has questions or technical issues. I think that helps the product’s marketing and brand image.
So, is streaming good? Yes, I think so, but it’s just one piece. Small things make something big.
Chord generator is your newest plugin. It’s also a MIDI effect — what draws you to build MIDI effects?
I love MIDI effects for their flexibility. If you have MIDI, you can send it wherever you want and generate sounds. I feel good with MIDI. It has a lot of potential also because you can visually represent a lot of things. Note values, their velocities, etc.
And also it’s fun, you can write things in expected ways and end up with unexpected results.
And even though both plugins are MIDI generators, the standalone versions have their own sampler, so they can also be loaded as an instrument. Also in the iPad version.
Ah, wow, didn’t realize you had iPad apps for both. Was that a lot of work?
The cool thing about JUCE is you can build it once and release on all platforms. Of course there are things we had to change. For example, on iPad right now you can’t drag and drop without modifying the JUCE framework, or at least that’s my understanding.
Also, file and preset management, shared folders… those things always trip me up a bit. But overall, it’s pretty straightforward.
Did you think about iPad from the start, when designing in Figma?
Yes! When I design the devices, I think they should be usable from a tablet; for example, making large button areas, even if the icon is small, leaving space between buttons, etc. It’s not always easy…
What about financially — is selling iPad apps worth it?
My experience is good. Not as good as desktop sales. In the case of Harmony Bloom and Chord Generator, the iPad price is $9.99. On desktop, it’s $29.
So iPad is third or less of your total revenue?
It’s maybe 15%.
I guess you have a lot of people on iPad though because it’s cheaper.
Yeah. It’s a lot of people. And requests!
Let’s talk about JUCE a bit — are you on JUCE 8 now? Happy with the drawing?
Yes, I always use the latest version.
Graphics have always been a bottleneck for me, so I have been experimenting with WebViews. It looks really promising. And really fast because you can use a lot of other frameworks. I have been testing out Three.js.
Three.js is great. Was drawing performance better when you moved to Direct2D on JUCE 8?
Yes, definitely. I mainly work on Windows, so I noticed the upgrade. Although I hope to get even more out of the UIs in the future using WebViews.
A lot of younger devs I talk to really like WebViews, because then you can use all of the existing tools. There’s lots of history. It’s solid, it’s fast.
Yeah, for me, it’s kind of like a dream. I’ve tinkered with libraries
like p5.js before, and even tried — a while back , to hook up a video game rendering system to JUCE… mmm… can’t remember the name; similar to raylib, but I failed. My intention was to create faster UIs without the bottleneck I used to experience, maybe due to lack of experience with JUCE.
Right now I’m working on a new project which is called MNodes. It’s a project to build projects.
A project to build projects — like a framework?
It’s a node-based program. You can connect nodes, like Max for Live or Reaktor or The Grid from BitWig.
I don’t know if this is the right thing to do — it’s a really really really huge project. I’ve been working on it for many years. I’ve had to rewrite it a couple of times.
What was the motivation? How is does it different than those other pograms?
Max for Live has the limitation that you can only work in Ableton Live. Reaktor you can use in different DAWs.
Well, I just enjoy doing it. I wanted to make my own vision of what a project like that could be. Many times when I was working with Max, I’d think, “Why isn’t this easier, just MIDI out and MIDI in and that’s all.”
So, to have a thing easy to use and super versatile. The point is that the users create their own plugins and their own patches.
Sounds fun! You probably have great MIDI tooling. Are you building a library of audio nodes too?
Yes, a bit of everything. Lately I’ve been messing with Faust.
Of course, there are a lot of todos. This is the type of project that never ends. I’m doing nodes for everything. For example, there are nodes for arpeggiators, or a reverb. I’m building widgets, for example a slider where you can customize it directly from an inspector.
I have to move slowly, because this is a castle and everything has to work well with no latency, the state must be saved correctly, undo/redo, repaints with the cables.
Do you have visualizers as well?
Yes, I have the typical meters, oscilloscope, a small spectrogram I built recently, but it’s provisional.
So you are really building “Mario Nieto World” in there, your house, your castle. Do you think you’ll release some other product in between, or is this the next product?
I’ll have to see. I will probably release a few more updates for Chord Generator and Harmony Bloom in the meantime.
I hope to release a stable version of MNodes before the end of the year.
End of the year! That’s exciting.
A first version. We will see. This project can be expanded infinitely, forever. There are no ends, but probably a first version for the end of the year — I hope!
Mario was interviewed by Sudara.
Have comments on this interview? Ideas for who we should talk to next? Let us know on the JUCE forum.