I didn't start as a developer. I started as a kid who couldn't stop making music.

My mom was a singer. I grew up around musicians — church, gospel, the whole culture. I started rapping in church, trying to be like Da Truth, deep in the gospel rap world. But I was always a mainstream hip hop fan too, listening to everything, absorbing it all. That tension — the sacred and the street — is honestly in everything I make.

I'm originally from Virginia Beach. East coast lyricism, southern production, that's my DNA. I relocated to Charlotte and started ghost writing and producing for acts around the city. Eventually I put out my own work — mixtapes, then my debut album "In My Mind" under Odic Records. Toured the HBCU Radio Network College Tour. "Extravagant" hit #7 on the Billboard Hot Singles charts.

Then life happened. I lost my mother. I took time away. I refocused, grieved, transformed.

When I came back I came back different. More intentional. And somewhere in that transformation I stopped just being an artist who used tools and started asking why the tools were the way they were.

I'd been using REAPER for years. It's the DAW that actually makes sense to me — the one that treats you like an adult, that lets you see inside everything, that doesn't hide its own guts from you. And JSFX — REAPER's built-in plugin format — blew my mind when I discovered it. You can write a compressor, a sampler, a synthesizer in a plain text file and load it as a real plugin. No compilation. No installer. Just math.

But building a GUI in JSFX is brutal. Every knob, every button, every meter — you're writing coordinates, calculating positions, handling mouse events line by line in @gfx code. I spent more time drawing interfaces than making music. I'd have a DSP idea and then spend three hours figuring out why my knob was rendering two pixels off.

I started building ReaKit to solve that for myself — a shared library of knobs, buttons, meters, sliders that I could drop into any plugin without rewriting everything from scratch. That grew into a full plugin suite. 19 plugins now. Compressors, EQs, samplers, console strips, the works.

And then one day I thought — what if you didn't have to write any of the @gfx code at all?

That's Forge. Drag a knob onto a canvas. Set its color and range. Export. Forge generates the slider declarations, the @gfx block, the full .jsfx skeleton — ready to open in REAPER with your GUI already working.

It's free. No account. No install. It runs in your browser at quazmusic.com/forge.

I built it because I kept thinking about all the producers and engineers who have ideas for plugins — who know exactly what they want to hear, what they want to control — but get stopped cold by @gfx code. The JSFX community is talented but small. Forge is my attempt to make the door wider.

The Guild membership unlocks all 9 ReaKit knob styles and REAPER live sync — see your changes in REAPER in real time as you edit. But the free version is a real tool. Not a demo. Not a teaser. A real tool.

I'm still an artist. Nu Trap Swing 3 is coming. But I'm also building the platform I wished existed when I started. Both things are true at the same time.

That's always been the story.

— Quaz / EON Studios

Charlotte, NC