Livid Instruments is Jay Smith, Peter Nyboer, and Travis Redding. We started Livid to turn our interests in alternative interfaces and performance tools into usable real-life products. Brought together through a collective passion of art, music, video, and interactive performance, we grew from a creative collaboration into a boutique manufacture of hardware and software products. We are dedicated to creating quality and thoughtful products, and manufacture everything in our “Livid Industry” shop in Austin, Texas. Like a custom guitar maker for digital performance, our products are crafted from fine woods and quality metals, and completely designed, manufactured, and assembled by us.
We take attention to detail very seriously in the creation of our products and only select the highest quality parts and materials for production. All the wood used in our instruments are hand picked by Travis from local wood suppliers in Austin, Texas. All components are also custom designed by us in an effort to make a controller with the quality and care you just can’t find in mass production. With a set of open source hardware and software tools, we encourage other artists and the creative community to adapt our products to their specific needs. Livid's mission is to empower artists to create with a sense of inventiveness and experimentation.
Livid Timeline
2000
• Jay Smith creates the Editar, an expressive interface and software for editing and mixing video and audio samples in real-time.
• Livid released the original Ohm MIDI control surface. The Ohm is available through dealers in 13 countries
• Livid’s manufacturing shop in Austin is expanded to include automated PCB assembly, metal and wood CNC machines, and everything needed to assemble and finish products in house.
