About Windward Audio

A small workshop at the edge of the map.

We make instruments for places that don’t exist: castles and taverns, spaceports and nebulae, empty buildings at night, a dark realm and a sunlit one. Each is a doorway, and composers are the ones who walk through.

Windward Audio began with a simple wish: to score a place rather than a sound. Film, TV and game composers spend their days building worlds, and most instruments hand them a list of patches and leave the world-building to them. We wanted instruments that start with the world.

So each instrument we make is built around somewhere. WORLDBUILDER holds twenty-six Places, each a small ensemble in your key and tempo: a tavern with a fiddle and a lute, a spaceport humming at three in the morning. LIMINAL plays fragile instruments inside empty buildings. DUNGEON CRAWLER and LIGHT SEEKER are twin realms, one under a red moon and one in full sun, with an instrument for every place.

We work slowly, on purpose. We would rather make a few instruments that feel lived in than many that feel the same.

Placeholder image: a moonlit pine forest in mist, standing in for a photograph of the workshop.
Photograph to come

Who makes it

One maker, one room, a lot of patience.

Windward Audio is [your name], a composer and developer in Ontario, Canada. [A sentence or two about your background: what you score, what you play, why you started building instruments.]

Every instrument is designed, programmed, recorded and tested here, from the first sketch to the last preset.

Recorded by hand

Our own sounds, played by hand.

Where our instruments play a recording, we almost always made it ourselves: a classical guitar played with the fingers and reshaped into a lute and an oud, a violin bowed, plucked and struck with the wood of the bow, a seventeen-tine kalimba recorded at three strengths, a piano, a banjo, two djembes, a voice, an analog synth. Even some of the reverbs are our own pedals, measured and rebuilt.

The one exception is credited: LIGHT SEEKER’s brass comes from VSCO 2 Community Edition by Versilian Studios, recordings released into the public domain. Everything else is played live by the instrument itself, so it can follow your key and tempo instead of repeating a fixed loop. And the recording continues.

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