The studio, rebuilt in software. Plugins and instruments that quietly ended up inside songs you already know by heart.
Output's calling card: the same toolkit a bedroom producer in Boise and a chart-topper in Los Angeles open before the first beat lands.
Somewhere right now, a producer hits play on a half-finished track and a small window opens over the timeline. It listens. A few seconds later it hands back a sample in the right key, at the right tempo, ready to drag onto the grid. That window is made by Output - a Los Angeles company that builds music software for the kind of people who never call it software. They call it gear.
Output is not a household name. The records it touched are. The company makes virtual instruments, effects and a cloud-connected sampler called Arcade, plus an AI tool called Co-Producer. Its plugins have shown up in songs by Drake, Justin Bieber, Coldplay and Rihanna, and in scores for Stranger Things, Game of Thrones and Black Panther. Roughly 420,000 musicians across 167 countries have run its tools.
Every producer knows the silence. The project is open, the tempo is set, and nothing happens. Photography solved its version of this with filters and phones. Video solved it with editing apps anyone could open. Music, for a long time, did not. The tools were powerful and miserable to use, built for engineers rather than the people humming a melody at 2 a.m.
The result was a strange gap. Talent was everywhere; finished tracks were not. The bottleneck was rarely inspiration - it was the dozen tedious steps between hearing something in your head and getting it to play back. Output's founder had lived inside that gap as a working composer, which is a polite way of saying he had stared at a blank session and lost.
Gregg Lehrman is an ASCAP-award-winning composer who trained under Hans Zimmer, the man behind half the movie scores you can hum. In 2013 he started Output - reportedly out of his own writer's block - with a simple wager: if the instrument itself sparked ideas, the blank session would stop winning. Early collaborators Neil Hallimen and John Nye helped ship the first product, Rev, an instrument built entirely from reversed audio.
The second bet was about money, or the deliberate absence of it. Output stayed bootstrapped for seven years. No seed round, no bridge, no growth-at-all-costs. The company shipped instruments, sold them to producers, and used the proceeds to make the next one. It is a quaint approach, the sort that startup Twitter politely ignores. It also worked.
Output's catalog reads like a producer's most-used folder. Each plugin takes one painful task and makes it fun. The flagship, Arcade, turns any audio you feed it into a playable instrument, sliced and chopped automatically. Co-Producer, the newest, listens to your whole session and surfaces samples that actually fit - no scrolling through ten thousand loops that don't.
Cloud-connected playable sampler with an ever-growing library. Drag in sound; it becomes an instrument.
AI on the master bus. Analyzes harmony and rhythm, returns royalty-free samples in your key and tempo.
The reverse-audio instrument that started it all, and a modern vocal engine for textures and leads.
Granular FX for motion and reverb; three-stage interactive distortion for grit.
A rhythm and effects sequencer that adds modulated motion to any static sound.
Orchestral engines blending real recordings with synthesis for modern cinematic scores.
Composer Gregg Lehrman starts Output and ships Rev, an instrument built from reversed audio.
Exhale, Movement, Analog Strings, Substance, Portal and Thermal arrive - funded by sales, not investors.
A subscription, cloud-connected sampler reframes Output from plugin shop to platform.
Summit Partners leads Output's first-ever raise after seven years of independence.
An AI plugin pitched to spark creativity rather than replace the human at the keys.
Ethically trained AI generates endless sample variations - built to dodge copyright strikes.
Credibility in music software is not earned in pitch decks. It is earned in credits. Output's tools sit in sessions run by Drake, Diplo, Zedd, Mike Dean and Lil Jon, and in scores streamed by tens of millions. The reach is wide and, unusually, measurable.
Output's stated goal is to bring the power of a professional studio to anyone, wherever they are. It is the kind of line every company writes and few earn. Output's claim to it is the bootstrapped decade - the years spent making tools good enough that working producers paid for them before any investor did.
The AI turn is the test of that mission. Co-Producer and Re-imagine could have been built to replace musicians. Output insists they are built to spark them - ethically trained, royalty-free, designed to hand you a starting point rather than a finished song. Whether that line holds as the technology improves is the open question. It is also, not coincidentally, the most interesting one in music right now.
Return to that producer, the one staring at the empty timeline. A decade ago the silence won more often than not. The talent was real; the finish line was far. Output's whole catalog is a sustained argument that the distance was never about ability - it was about tools that fought you.
Now the window opens, listens, and offers something to start with. The producer drags it in. The session stops being blank. That is a small moment, repeated 420,000 times across 167 countries, and it adds up to a quiet shift in who gets to make music at all. Output did not write the songs. It just made the silence easier to break.