Marek Bereza Creator of the Koala Sampler | Synth TalkKoala is a sampler for iOS and Android with a well thought out workflow, designed by Marek Bereza. The workflow keeps you from stumbling down a rabbit-hole of micro-editing, tweaking parameters, undoing, redoing, etc. I spoke with Marek who now lives in London to find out more about his design process and background.

Koala on the iPhone<br>A Long Line of Samplers

Koala is the latest in a long line of samplers I’ve made over the years. Over the last 20 years, I’ve been making things that record sounds and then do stuff with the audio.

Koala's design was heavily influenced by a myth about J Dilla creating his last album, Donuts, with the very straightforward Boss SP-303 sampler.

This story of using the SP-303 to make an album distills the notion of creativity from constraints. Given this limited sampler, look at the magical music you can make with it. As a musician, I found that really inspiring. So I just wanted to make something quite simple that gives you a lot of power. One trick of the SP-303 is resampling its own output. For me, as a design concept, I think it is similar to a Spirograph. The Spirograph idea is 2 circles, you have a big circle and a little circle. Those 2 circles are very simple, but they add up to more than the sum of their parts. When you start using it, you start getting all of these complexities. That is what I like about the magic of resampling, you can keep putting things through effects and round and round until it is completely unrecognizable. You can then play a rhythm with that and put it through a delay. Then sample a little bit of that and it turns into a tone, like a synthesizer. I really like that.

Don’t be too precious with creating, just get on with it and make some music.

Boss SP-303<br>Interaction in Musical Instruments

The whole idea of coming up with things you never would have on your own is one thing you can really do with interaction design in musical instruments or software. You can basically stop people from going down the route they usually go down. I found this when I was younger. After a few years of opening up the piano roll and putting a bass drum here and a snare drum there it gets really dull. You can make software that forces people to do things differently. For instance, that is why Koala doesn’t have a piano roll. This forces people out of their comfort zone and to play in real-time. When you play things in real-time it tends to be more musical.

People do get upset with Koala not having a piano roll. The first prototype of Koala did have a piano roll by accident. I wanted to make a bold decision. Maybe some people think I don't know how to program or don't want to be bothered. It was an active decision not to have a piano roll.

Design

You have to be not too afraid to scrap something that is hurting the design.

A lot of the design came from trying it out. When there was a frustration I would try and address it. You have to be not too afraid to scrap something that is hurting the design in some way. I got it down most of the way in the paper prototype.

Koala Screenshots During Development<br>UI Evolution

I put a line of code in my program right at the beginning to take one screenshot after 5 seconds of running the app and just save it into a folder. I made it into a video so you can see it evolve. It is nice to see your own process as it evolves.

WWDC 2015 Designing With Animation

At WWDC 2015, I did a talk about prototyping with two other colleagues called Designing with Animation. The year before there was a talk called Fake It Till You Make It, this was the sequel to Designing with Animation.

At Apple, I did a lot of drawing and showing pictures of things to people. It saves you so much time. You don’t have to program the whole thing to find out if it will work or not.

So You Started Prototyping Koala on Paper?

I usually like to start programming early in a project, but with Koala I spent a month drawing on paper. The good thing about drawing on paper is the sky’s the limit, you are not restricted, you can try out any idea quickly. It is a good way of collating your thoughts.

Eventually, you have to start drawing simple images on the computer because you need the fidelity and accuracy. I use Sketch, it is used a lot for web and UI stuff. I’ve fallen in love with it, and it is wicked. I just started doing iterations in Sketch and working on a list of problems I had to solve with the interface. I did hundreds of evolutions of the interface. It started out looking awful, then it got slightly better. It is not good to increment too much. It is better to take a lot of u-turns and not be afraid of throwing things away and starting again. Losing some work is ok, avoid the sunk cost fallacy. I got it to the stage where I was mostly happy with but not finished and I started taking it to a few friends who do music. I talked through the designs with them or just asked them to look at it. This is a...