10 Years of Goodhertz

Goodhertz has officially been in business for 10 years, though as a collaboration between Rob and I, it was in the works a bit earlier than that.

One of the first things we worked on together was Panpot. I had a working prototype going, but couldn’t get the interface to feel right. One of Rob’s first contributions was to put the slider values on the slider handle itself — something you don’t see often (ever?), and a signature of Goodhertz plugins that remains to this day.

I remember a question sent to us very early on by a customer: what would happen to the plugins if we go out of business? Would they still function? Would old sessions be recoverable? We assured them they would be made available somehow.

The question made me wonder: would we be in business years from now? Would people care about these very different plugins? Could we support families with them? Questions too heavy to think about long, we just kept working on our first release.

And here we are 10 years later, from humble beginnings in a Pasadena garage to your ears. People do use our plugins on a lot of very cool things, and Goodhertz has provided for several families at this point.

I don’t have a conclusion to this post other than to say thank you to everyone past & present who has used our stuff and been part of Goodhertz. For a company that doesn’t advertise much, I’m always surprised by how many people know about us and have nice things to say.

Even though there can be a fair amount of complexity in what we make, all the bits & bytes boil down to something beautifully simple once the sound waves leave the speakers. I hope we’ve given you a few moments of “that sounds incredible!” — we’ll aim to keep doing just that.