About Bram Bos & Ruismaker

The Hammerhead Years

It's the mid-90s; the era of Napster, Fast Tracker, and gaudy Winamp skins. The internet is still in its infancy: slow, tiny, and mostly populated by geeks and students. Email is the hot new communication tool, and we're all on Usenet and mailing lists because social media platforms don't exist yet.

Musical instruments are undergoing a revolution. For the first time, mainstream instruments - such as Roland's first Groovebox - are catering to the young scene of bedroom musicians and indie electronic musicians operating out of an attic instead of a professional recording studio.

This is the exciting era in which I created Hammerhead, my first music application; initially a weekend project for some friends and roommates. It became one of the first drum computers made for electronic drums that could easily run on your dad's PC. A friend posted Hammerhead on Usenet, yielding hundreds of thousands of downloads (and overloading the university server). Over the years, millions of people have enjoyed using Hammerhead – a truly humbling experience.

Enter Ruismaker

Since then I've always been making music software as a Friday-afternoon hobby activity. Some time in 2015 I got the idea to make an actual hardware drum machine; "Ruismaker". A few months later I had a working prototype, with most of the embedded software ready, including the synthesis engine. However, I could not find a manufacturer willing to partner with me. So the project was (literally) shelved.

Until Apple introduced their Audio Unit plugin technology on the iOS mobile platform not long after. I knew how to make apps... I could turn my Ruismaker drumcomputer into the first drumsynth for Apple's new plugin standard instead!

The rest is - as they say - history. I have had the pleasure of pioneering lots of "firsts" in the mobile music plugin scene: the first MIDI plugins (Rozeta), the first modular synth in plugin form (Ripplemaker), and several other things.

I'm now what they call an "Indie Developer" of music software plugins, for Apple's mobile platform. I consider myself more a designer who happens to have access to development tools. Making musical instruments gives me a creative outlet, allowing me to learn and experiment, and do things that I would never be able to do in my actual day job (Automotive UX Design).

For news, updates and random unrelated stuff, you can follow me on Bluesky