Client Project
CASCADE
A creative delay plugin that stays fast on the surface while hiding a modulation engine no delay has offered before.
Project overview
Client
Mixing Night Audio
Industry
Audio Software
Role
Product Design
Duration
1 Sprint
Cascade is the second collaboration with Mixing Night Audio, the plugin company founded by Ken Lewis, a veteran producer and mix engineer whose credits span BTS, Drake, Eminem and Kanye West. After ALLCOMP, the brief moved from utility into creative territory: a delay plugin ambitious enough to be the last one a producer ever needs.
The product's promise was double-edged by design. Fast and intuitive on the surface dedicated buttons for echo, slap and ping-pong, timing you click rather than dial. Then CASCADE Mode underneath: up to sixteen repetitions with modulation assignable to every effect, where echoes can grow louder instead of quieter, widen over time, or open filters for tension. Two very different depths, one interface.
Challenge
A delay this capable creates a hierarchy problem before a single pixel is drawn. Put the power up front and the fast path drowns; hide it too deep and the headline feature disappears.
The harder question sat with the two main dials. Feedback and Mix are the most-touched controls on any delay, they had to dominate the layout, carry a visual tone that felt like nothing else on the market, and stay balanced against each other without competing. Around them, the sections had to follow the order a producer actually works in when they're in flow: shape the delay, style it, push it further, not the order the engineering happens in.
Design Principles
Hierarchy follows the session, not the signal chain
Type, timing and style come first because that's the first decision a producer makes. The FX and advanced sections sit exactly where curiosity arrives, not where the DSP architecture would put them.
Two speeds, one surface
The quick path and CASCADE Mode share the same interface rather than splitting into beginner and expert views. Depth is revealed, never relocated.
The main dials carry the identity
Feedback and Mix are oversized, reactive and unmistakably Cascade's. If a producer screenshots the plugin, those two controls are the brand.
Key Decisions
Killing the delay-time dial
The era of fumbling with clunky time dials ended at the top of the interface: timing became buttons you click, with a free mode for exact milliseconds. The single most-used delay interaction went from rotary guesswork to one press.
Oversized Feedback and Mix as the anchor pair
The two dials producers touch most were scaled up and tuned as a matched pair — equal visual weight, shared tone, deliberately different from anything else in the category. The rest of the layout arranges itself around them.
Sections mapped to flow
Type, Timing, Style across the top, FX in the middle, Advanced below. Each band answers the next question a producer asks, so moving down the interface mirrors moving deeper into a sound.
CASCADE Mode as a destination
The modulation engine lives behind a single deliberate switch rather than crowding the main view. Turning it on feels like opening the hood, the interface shifts register, and the Slope dial takes over as the controlling hand for how every effect behaves across repetitions.
Scaling the system
Energy with discipline
Cascade's visual language is more energetic than a typical mixing tool, punchy FX styling, reactive states, dials with genuine presence, but every element stays on a strict hierarchy so the speed of the quick path is never compromised. The system flexes louder in CASCADE Mode and pulls back everywhere else.
Outcome
Cascade shipped commercially as Mixing Night Audio's flagship creative plugin — AAX, AU and VST3 across macOS and Windows.
What Shipped
Complete plugin interface across standard and CASCADE Mode
Custom oversized dial system for Feedback and Mix
FX and Advanced section design (Chorus, Heat, Width, Wash, Ducking, Swing, Formant, LFO)
Reactive visual feedback states
Full developer handoff
Impact
Live commercial product at $99
Computer Music performance award
Featured on KVR Audio, Sound On Sound, MusicRadar and Computer Music
Second engagement in an ongoing client relationship
Reflection