Our Story

Chapter 1 – Music Production.

Back in 1995, Jani was just a regular kid in the school. But then he found Electronic Dance Music by accident while listening to Finnish local radio while being sick in the bed. Later he found out that the track was written by Scooter and it was from the album “And the beat goes on”. His biggest influence was Rick J Jordan from Scooter. Their music production level and studio tour videos with all the different blinking synthesizers was just something he couldn’t handle. This ignited his passion for making music and burning excitement towards Synthesizers. It was all set.

20 years & 90+ own singles, co-productions and remixes later, his music was released by labels such Anjunabeats, Afterglow Records, Monster Tunes, Alter Ego Records, Finity, Blue Soho Recordings and many more. Big milestone in music was when “Kaste – Desert Eagle” (co-written with Mika Savela) hit Finnish official singles chart position 13 and was in it for few weeks. Great reviews came from DJ Magazine for his own “Mystery Islands – Jungle Breeze” hitting 5/5.

In 2004, Jani moved to United Kingdom and worked as a ghost producer and engineer for almost a year. During that time he was also playing on events as a DJ but didn’t like the business and being in front of everyone, so he went back to studio with all the synthesizers. Making ghost productions to everyone else got dull and he moved back to Finland.

Chapter 2 – Production Environment.

Making music was still something he wanted to do, but not for others. Music production methods changed over time a lot and new software synthesizers was coming out like mushrooms in the rain. Software was faster to use, it recalled all the plug-in settings when a project was reopened. Hardware synthesizers were forgotten, put away in the storage or even sold.

Even through the software was evolving, hardware synthesizer sound had that something. After working a lot with software synthesizers, Jani wanted to have a plug-in for hardware synths with the same capabilities as software synths. He learned there was some software editors for Clavia Nord 2 and Waldorf Pulse, which could integrate the hardware interface to software environment. Jani reached several companies asking for an editor & co-work to build more for synths he owned that time. No companies showed interest. The idea of building his own editor came alive, but he had no experience of coding.

Chapter 3 – Making the connection.

In early 2010 Jani started to study C++ and a development framework for synthesizers with the guidance by Arto Vaarala. The learning process was slow, since they both had day job and family. Not long after their collaboration started, the first version of our Roland JP-80×0 AudioUnit Editor was released. It was ugly looking, lacking patch management functions and it was only available for macOS users. In fact, only thing it was capable of doing was MIDI CC and SysEx editing or parameters.

Within the next 6 months, PC version was released, yet missing the vital elements. 6 more months passed and total recall & patch management was included with a sleek looking user interface. Mystery Islands Music was born and plug-ins were ready for markets.

By then end of 2017, we had 8 plug-ins: Access VirusHC for Access Virus family, Clavia NL2xR for Clavia Nord 1 & 2 family, Waldorf qXr for Waldorf Q family, Waldorf microQxR for Waldorf microQ family, Waldorf bloX for Waldorf Blofeld family, Roland JP-80×0 for Roland JP-8000 & JP-8080, Korg microKxR for Korg microKorg and Korg MS2KxR for Korg MS2000 family.

Chapter 4 – The Future.

We want to build the best Editor & Librarian plug-ins for Digital Audio Workstation environments. We are constantly improving, adding new features and building our product base one by one. Our plan is to hire staff for development, shop management and support – If you think you have something to give us, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

Don’t leave the hardware behind – make the connection, again.

Make The Connection Again – How does it work?