ABOUT STORYBORED AUDIO
Some people can’t help writing songs. I can’t help taking sound apart.
STORYBORED Audio is an independent audio plugin company in the Santa Cruz Mountains, California. We make effects and instruments for musicians, producers and sound designers, in VST3, AU and AAX, for Mac and Windows. STORYBORED was started in 2025 by Ryan Wardell, who spent twenty years building audio software at Avid and Universal Audio, from Pro Tools to LUNA and UA’s native plugins.
A NOTE FROM RYAN
There’s a good chance something I’ve worked on is installed on your computer right now. Over the last twenty years I’ve worked on dozens of plugins and features that people use every day, and I was lucky to get to do that at Avid and Universal Audio.
I love making music, but I get pulled toward the sound itself. I’m always wondering how something gets its sound: a pedal I’ve loved for years, the reverb inside an old game console, what would happen if you pulled a circuit apart and put it back together a different way. Figuring that out, then building something other people can play with, sometimes feels like my version of writing a song.
It started with my first DAW in high school. I read the manual cover to cover. In Atlanta I wanted to be an engineer. I assisted on sessions, picked up mix gigs with local bands, sold gear at Atlanta Pro Audio, and ran a small business building studios for composers moving off racks of hardware samplers and onto computers. Somewhere in there I realized I didn’t want to spend my life recording other people’s records. I just wanted to make music with my friends (Super VGA) and work on making tools.
In 2005 I moved to California for a tech support job at Digidesign, answering calls about Pro Tools. Over the next twelve years at Avid I worked in support, then QA, my first time inside the software itself, then engineering, and eventually I ran product design and product management for the Pro Tools audio business. The first plugins I worked on as a designer were Pro Multiband Dynamics and Pro Subharmonic, and later Eleven MkII.
In 2017 I left for Universal Audio to focus on software and plugins. UA made so many great products, and getting them to anyone who wanted them was a big goal for me there. I brought UA’s plugins native, so they could run on your computer without dedicated DSP hardware, and led the design of UA’s software products, including newer endeavors like its instruments and LUNA. A few of my favorites from those years: the UA 175B & 176 tube compressors, the PolyMAX synth, the API Vision console emulation for LUNA, Sound City Studios and Verve Analog Machines.
I love that gear, and working on emulations teaches you an enormous amount about why classic hardware sounds the way it does. The more I learned, the more I wanted to see where those sounds could go next, and which corners nobody was exploring yet. I pushed hard at UA to innovate, not only emulate, and that pull is ultimately what led me to move on and build STORYBORED.
STORYBORED is where I get to focus on the things I want to make, and give them what the best products I worked on always had: time to incubate, to be curious, to follow a strange idea and see where it goes. Almost everything here starts with being curious. What if? Could we? What happens if we try?
— Ryan Wardell, founder
WHAT WE MAKE
- re:SYNTH: a free guitar-synth effect that rebuilds a classic 70s pedal for the DAW
- LATEFIELD: five algorithmic reverbs, generated live
- GRAINCLOUDS: a granular delay with eight algorithms
- MICROLOOPS: an ephemeral sampler with six algorithms
- SPU-94: a reconstruction of a 90s game-console reverb
TALKS
Ryan shares what he learns building plugins with other developers at the Audio Developer Conference (ADC).
- Are You Shipping Your Source Code? (ADC Japan 2026): what AI-assisted decompiling means for plugin developers and the communities who use their software. Video coming soon.
- Continuous QA Testing for Plugins Using AI and Python (ADC 2025): keeping plugin quality high with automated, AI-assisted testing.
- Accelerate UI Development: Seamless Designer-Developer Collaboration with Web Tools (ADCx 2025): getting plugin interfaces from design to code faster.
AT A GLANCE
| Company | STORYBORED Audio |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2025 |
| Founder | Ryan Wardell |
| Based in | Santa Cruz Mountains, California |
| Makes | Audio effect and instrument plugins |
| Formats | VST3, AU, AAX |
| Platforms | macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows |
| Contact | hello@storybored.io |
SAY HELLO
Questions, feedback, a sound you wish existed? Write to hello@storybored.io. It’s a real inbox and a real person reads it.
For support, tell us your DAW, your operating system and the plugin version, and we’ll get you sorted faster.