About Berry FX
Two friends, a lot of plugins, and one gap.
Berry FX is Abe and Ralph, two lifelong bandmates from New Jersey, and a small team making effects from scratch and tuning them by ear.
Friends since childhood. Bandmates since 13.
We’re Abe and Ralph. We’ve been friends since we were kids, started our first band at 13, and have been making music together ever since. Abe’s a multi-instrumentalist but primarily a guitarist, and Ralph’s got the drums and percussion covered. We both studied music in college. Abe earned a degree in Music Business at NYU, and Ralph a degree in Music Management at Monmouth University.
We played the iconic New York clubs of our day, including CBGB, Wetlands and the Hammerstein Ballroom. We’ve recorded across New Jersey and New York at Shorefire in Long Branch and Lakehouse in Asbury Park, and sat in on mastering sessions at Masterdisk in NYC. Along the way, Abe worked at Columbia Records, and Ralph managed artists and got acts signed to Epic and other labels.
Today we both run home studios, where we track and produce our own music and other people’s. Berry FX is what we built for those rooms.
Abe
Co-founder
Ralph
Co-founder
The gap
Between the two of us, we own a lot of plugins. We love experimenting with them and comparing brands, and a little under two years ago we kept hitting the same wall. Every reverb we owned either sounded great and took forever to dial in, or was quick and sounded cheap. We wanted both. And we wished we could push the tools we already had further.
So we started experimenting. The first idea was Sweet-R. We used to chain multiple plugins together to get the reverb sound we were imagining. What if one tool could do it, and go further? Sweet-R adds a whole new layer on top of a reverb you’ve already dialed in. That’s the Sweetness panel, and it took us places our old chains never could.
Compote came from a memory. We both remember googling “best compressor for vocals” and “which compressor for guitar.” So we built one compressor with five inside it. Tell it what you’re working on and it points you to the right one. Making it easy didn’t mean cutting corners on sound.
“We went at it from the perspective of not trying to outdo the plugins we already have. It’s about finding that space where we could be unique.”
“With Ripeness, we felt the loudness meters out there were all missing something. So we set out to build the most complete one we could: as much information about your mix as possible, so you know exactly what to adjust. I think Ripeness does that.
Sweet-R and Compote came from the same thinking: build the only reverb and the only compressor you’ll ever need, with every style of compression you’ll reach for. They’re not copies of one piece of vintage hardware. They cover that ground and then keep going. That’s where the value is: everything in one plugin, plus a whole lot more.”
Tuned by ear. Then tuned again.
The producers and engineers who test our plugins work anonymously, so we can’t name them. We can tell you how the process works. We listen, they listen, and nothing ships until it feels right to all of us.
Candi-D worked from day one, but the balance felt off. We spent weeks with our engineers refining the algorithm until the Ratio and Skew knobs landed somewhere we trusted.
The Sweetness and Sourness panels are our secret sauce, and there really are recipes behind them. The recipes are our engineers’ magic. Our job was making sure they tasted right. We kept listening until they made a track sound expensive, without the plugin being expensive to buy.
Juic-C started with a question. Could we build impulse responses without traveling the world to record them? And then, could we pull them apart and mix and match the pieces? Yes to both. The result is convolution reverb that builds rooms that don’t exist anywhere else.
Why the fruit?
Who hasn’t listened back to a take and said, “Man, that sounds so sweet”? We’ve said it a thousand times. So when we were naming our first plugin, a reverb, one of us said, “Let’s make it sweeter than the others.” Then we noticed the word ends in R, as in Reverb. We added a hyphen and Sweet-R was born.
Every name since has followed the same recipe. It’s something you can taste that tells you what it does. Candi-D is a delay, and Juic-C is a convolution reverb. Compote is a compressor, and compote is practically smoothly blended fruit. And Ripeness, our free loudness meter, answers the question every mix eventually asks. Is your track ripe yet?
Who it’s for
Everyone, and we mean that. We designed for both ends from the start. First, the engineer working against the clock, who needs a tool strong enough to lock in the right sound fast and do the work of three plugins. Then the person just starting out, who deserves to understand what they’re turning. So we built in a help and info system that guides you through every control and stays out of the way while you work. And when you don’t need it anymore, switch it off.
“When artists are making a record, there’s enough pressure already. Nobody should be worrying about their gear, especially then. Artists want their tools to do what they’re supposed to do. That’s why our plugins are intuitive and come loaded with great presets, so you can get where you need to go fast when the clock is running. And when there’s time to wander, you can. Turn the Sourness panel in Candi-D or the Sweetness panel in Sweet-R and see where it takes you.”
In the studio
“Feel and groove come first, without a doubt. No plugin will save a bad performance. But once the take is there, our plugins are made for drums. Compote gives you a whole range of compression styles in one place, so you can try different drum sounds without switching plugins. Sweet-R does the same with space: keep a kit tight and small, or make it huge. Candi-D is a blast on drums for finding new ways to push the groove forward. Where it really shines, though, is on vocals. Pair it with Juic-C on a vocal and you’ll get results you won’t hear anywhere else.”
Our go-tos
- Abe: “Sweet-R on anything. Seriously, anything.”
- Ralph: “Parallel compression with Compote, on drums, vocals, bass, almost everything. My favorite trick is a mic in the center of the kit, compressed way harder than you’d think is appropriate. It does something really cool to drums.”
- And neither of us can stay away from Candi-D. The echoes you can get out of it send us somewhere new every time.
Small on purpose
Berry FX is a small team. A lead engineer oversees the code, our customer success team makes sure no question goes unanswered, and the two of us handle the parts we’d never hand off. That’s the concepts, taking care of the people who use our plugins, and getting the word out.
We’ve got a short list of plugins we love, and we’re always looking for the next place we can do something no one else is doing. When you write to us, a real person writes back. And we can’t stop talking about what we’ve made.
We built Berry FX for the sessions where everything clicks, and for the ones where you’re still figuring it out. Either way, Ralph said it best.
“Have fun!”