Seth Watson

The Beginning

Basements, bars, and the long way around

It started in the basements and bars of small-town Wisconsin, playing guitar in bands like Plain White T-Shirt, Cold Hard Cash, and Terra Incognito. The kind of gigs where you load your own gear, split the door four ways, and play because you can't not play.

When I started producing my own recordings, I had to make the most of very little. I wanted to push every tool as far as it could go, and then further. I was curious about what was possible, what was missing, and what could exist if someone just created it. That curiosity planted the first seed of what would eventually become Fine Increments.

Training

From stage to studio to code

I pursued formal training at Columbia College Chicago, studying audio technology, music theory, and performance. Between classes, I played solo acoustic songwriter gigs around the city. A recording gig with Cash'd Out, the official Johnny Cash tribute band, sharpened my engineering instincts under real-world pressure.

At the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, I studied computer science and earned a B.A. in Philosophy. I performed in the Jazz Ensemble and New Music Ensemble. It was here that I built the first prototype of Guitarmonizer in Visual Basic. It was the earliest proof of code solving a music problem.

It was also here that I studied jazz piano under Nadi Qamar, a pianist who performed with Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, and Charles Mingus. That lineage taught me something no textbook could: what music is supposed to feel like, and that you learn an instrument by putting your hands on it.

The Production Years

Five years in Los Angeles

After moving to Los Angeles, I produced electronic music under the name RIDDNCE for five years, collaborating with artists like Osiris Marshall and DJ Climpo. The LA years were about output, experimentation, and learning firsthand what the tools could and couldn't do.

Then I stopped. Not because I lost interest, but because I needed to think. I spent time studying the physics of sound, the philosophy of music, and the relationship between the two. The question wasn't "how do I make music?" It was "what should music be doing?"

Fine Increments

Building tools that break limits

The answer became the company.

Wavefield exists because filtering could be more sophisticated, more musical, more alive - and I wanted to prove it. Guitarmonizer exists because I wanted to see what would happen if chord voicing was truly unlimited. Every tool starts the same way: a question about what's possible, asked in the middle of making real music.

I'm not interested in building yet another delay or reverb, emulations of hardware, or your 10th wavetable synth. There are already great versions of those things. I make music, and build the tools that solve a problem I have or fulfill a "what if" kind of vision. If something already does the job, I don't want to fill your folders with slight variations of what you already have. I want to take you exploring with me.