A small sound workshop in Brazil.

A looper, a mixer
and a library, so far.

Why we started

There are a lot of great plugins out there. Still, some of the things we wanted to play with didn’t exist. Nobody had made a no-input mixer you could play inside a DAW on Windows. Some pedals we loved only came as hardware, at hardware prices. Software to fix the wobble in old tape recordings was priced for archives, not for musicians.

So we make them ourselves. We leave well enough alone, take our time with what hasn’t been done yet, and move on to the next one.

A story we keep in mind

In the late 1960s, the Brazilian band Os Mutantes couldn’t buy the gear they wanted. It was too expensive, or it never made it to Brazil. So the older brother of two of its members built it for them: guitars, amplifiers, effects.

The sound that came out of it didn’t exist anywhere else. We think about that every time something we want doesn’t exist yet.

We have no connection to the band. It’s just a story we love.

What we make

Two kinds of things:

Experiments. Plugins to play with and get lost in.
Tools. For everyday studio work.

There’s more on the bench. We’ll show you when it’s ready.

The name

Washi. In Japanese, it can mean eagle or handmade paper, depending on how you write it. The eagle is our mark: it sits in the sun at the top of every plugin, and it’s pressed into the panel as a small seal. The paper gave us the color of everything we print, starting with this page.

How we sell

We sell plugins and apps the way we’d like to buy them:

Pay once, use it forever. No subscription. Every update is free.
Three computers per license. Free one up yourself from inside the plugin or app, even if that computer is dead.
Activate once, use it offline forever. When you’re online, it quietly checks in once a month.
Your presets are plain files. Copy them, share them, back them up.
We only collect what activation needs: your license key, a hashed computer ID, and the computer’s name. Nothing about how you use them.
If it’s not for you, get a full refund within 14 days.

Who we are

One person at the bench, writing the code and drawing the panels. The team at our software company takes care of the rest: servers, licensing, support.

Questions, bug reports, or a sound you can’t find anywhere? Write to us at contact@washiaudio.com.