We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Goran Rista a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Goran, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Some 15 years ago, I based myself in Miami, FL, as I often traveled and played shows on cruise ships. Digital recording gear was affordable, and computers were finally able to offer decent performance, so I invested in a modest setup. I had my first drum-recording setup in the apartment I was renting. At the time, I was solely a performing musician, so the recording setup was meant for my experimentation, learning, and fun.

After a while, I felt that there were likely many independent music creators worldwide who I could help with their drum tracking needs for their recording projects. While playing live, I could only lend my drumming talent to a few local acts; the internet offered opportunities to collaborate with many people from everywhere.

So, I embarked on a mission to get myself and my drumming skills involved with as many musical acts as possible. How I have gone about it has evolved significantly over the years. While performing live at first, it expanded to online drum recording, then to the production of drum loops, drum sample libraries, and most recently to virtual drum instrument plugins.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I established the online platform GoranGrooves to offer drum recording services to music creators worldwide. To make it a more fulfilling service, I partnered up with other musicians to provide a range of music-recording services. However, my main focus and objective have been related to all drums and percussion recording needs.

It is a fact that many producers, musicians, and singers/ songwriters utilize virtual instruments and tools these days, and a few can afford live musicians. So, to meet the full drum recording solutions, I also needed to venture into other areas. A few years back, I expanded my drum recording skills into digital products that I can quickly scale and reach a much wider userbase.
We are slowly phasing out the recording services to focus primarily on scalable digital products.

With the opening of our GoranGrooves Library, we presented a series of virtual instruments and MIDI loops. They are aimed at people recording and producing music using digital audio workstations (DAW). We introduced Handy Drums, a virtual drum plugin collection, and Handy Grooves, the accompanying MIDI drum loop packages.

We are neither first nor the last to develop drum plugins. There are some powerful tools out there, but I find them to be overly complex and overwhelming while lacking realism.

What sets us apart is the simplicity, ease of use, and the album-like, finished drum sound out of the box. Simplicity is at the core of everything we do: from how we present our products to purchase flow, down to installation and usage of our digital products. Our goal is to make it simple, intuitive, and quick for producers to make music using our products.

We have a clearly-defined branding that carries universally through our products, platform, emails, and any point of contact with end-users.

So, the end goal is this: whatever path a music creator chooses to take when producing their music, be it live drum recording, loops, plugins, or samples, we’ll have the right tools and services for them.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

As a professional drummer by trade, developing virtual software instruments and forming a new business model around them was by far the single most challenging journey I have ever embarked on.

There have been countless hiccups and issues along the way, none of which I am qualified to resolve, yet I have managed to prevail. It went something like this…

I originally produced drum sample libraries for a hardware product, BeatBuddy, and at the time, this was the first time I had completed such a task. Fortunately, the specific approaches I had implemented turned out to be successful. As early as that initial production engagement, I had a vision that I would make my sample drum libraries available for those making their music on a computer.

I knew I wanted a handy user interface for my drum libraries and initially started making them for an existing platform, Kontakt, a software sampler. Only then did I realize the limitations for both users and myself as a developer and abandoned that approach for the benefit of creating my own plugins.

Once again, I started from scratch using an open-source sampler platform. While I could accomplish specific tasks using the built-in functionalities, most of the needed functions had to be coded. For a drummer with no software engineering knowledge, this was equivalent to starring at Mount Everest with the desire to cross over it but no idea, gear, or skills for how to accomplish that.

So, I started with whatever little tasks I could do. I designed a beautiful graphic user interface, exported individual elements, and assembled them within the sampler platform. I went about figuring out whatever I could and connecting what I could. I imported my existing drum samples and played around with them to make them work as they should.

In some situations, I realized I had to re-record and remix specific instruments, which I did.
I got some help with coding from a couple of developers and was given hints on the direction by others. I spent a lot of time analyzing code, agonizing, making sense of it, and customizing it.

It was extremely difficult, and I felt like throwing in the towel so many times, but one thought kept me going. I am very committed and persistent, so it would be even more challenging for someone to follow in my footsteps if it was this hard for me. I knew that only the most resilient would complete the journey, so I made one tiny step in front of the other. I pressed on little by little.

There have been countless challenges with compiling software on Windows and Mac, troubleshooting, fixing things, learning how to code-sign, notarize, create installers for those platforms, designing artwork, setting the website with the server, customizing it, designing custom functionalities, all artwork, product descriptions, and the list goes on.
I did work on what 20 people would be designated to do in an organization.

Despite all odds, I prevailed. I depended solely on my relentless can-do attitude and analytical thinking. I abandoned all deadlines and instead focused only on constant daily progress, no matter how small it may be. I am happy to report that I climbed and crossed Mount Everest of tasks.

For the last few years, my daily work has not been doing what I know how to do well. Instead, it has consisted solely of figuring out what needs to be solved, then finding solutions to the problem. Daily learning and problem-solving is the most significant part of my work. I am many things, but most significantly, I am resourceful.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect of being creative is creating my own destiny as much as possible. Taking the road less traveled can be scary and uncertain, but also very personally rewarding. I love when I conceptualize a product or a business model, work hard on making it happen, then see the fruits of all the labor. Doing things my way, and fulfilling my vision, be it for a product, service, or business model, is the ultimate reward.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://library.gorangrooves.com
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/gorangrooves
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/gorangrooves
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/gorangrooves
• Other: Visit their website for more information on GoranGrooves and their Handy Drums plugins.