Reimund "Ray" Dratwa is the founder of Fuse Audio Labs. With a penchant for discovering, replicating and inventing rare and unconventional audio technology, Ray brings a lifetime of experience to the audio production field. His obsession with music and audio technology began in an abandoned train station when he was in his early teens living in a small German town. There, he would find abandoned TVs, radios and stereos that he'd disassemble and use to build circuits such as AM receivers or amplifiers. He later developed a love for playing instruments like the guitar and drums and a keen interest in recording technology that he still possesses today. The combination of an early obsession with tech and a deep passion for music set the stage for Ray's mastery in the field of audio plugin development. In the early 90s he learned how to write code on 16/32 bit Atari computer systems first using Omikron Basic before switching to 68k and 56k assembly language. Ray later studied Electrical/Computer Engineering in Aachen, Germany where he mastered the fundamentals of DSP and analog modeling that would go on to inform his career. He also led an active music career during the education he received in his early twenties which involved playing drums for various local bands and recording music on a 4-track portastudio. It was around this time when Ray began exploring audio production in DAW environments like Cool Edit Pro or Cubase. Impressed by how intuitive the digital production process was, Ray experimented designing his own audio plugins for DirectX and VST2 that were written in C++.

His experience performing in and recording bands also led to a vivid passion for analog recording gear, something that would later inspire the overarching design philosophy of Fuse Audio Labs. Ray received his diploma in 2011 with a thesis centered around blind audio separation, an experience crucial in developing the DrumsSSX plugin, a revolutionary audio tool with the ability to separate individual percussion instruments within drum recordings. Ray's sizable talent and accomplishments in university soon landed him a position at the German audio software company Brainworx. In this role, he was tasked with modeling analog systems for brands like Millennia, Vertigo Sound, Elysia, Maag, ACME Audio, Black Box Analog Design and others¹. Looking for a new challenge, Ray left Brainworx in 2016 to launch Black Rooster Audio with a former colleague before setting out on his own with Fuse Audio Labs. Fuse Audio Labs was founded in 2017 with the mission of creating and replicating rare and unconventional audio tools. The company represents the culmination of decades of Ray's experience and experimentation in the intersection of analog audio technology, music recording and computer programming. Ray's affinity for music gear comes out in his work with Fuse as evidenced by the way his plugins are designed to look, operate and sound like hardware. From Ray's early explorations tinkering around with circuit-building and analog recording gear to recent game-changing plugin inventions like the DrumsSSX Drum Remixer, Ray's work with Fuse Audio Labs celebrates innovation, creativity and passion for everything sound.