About Marula Music

Marula Music is an independent audio software and soundware studio founded by South African producer, DJ and sound designer Nate Raubenheimer, best known as Protoculture. It brings together the different parts of his working life: making records, designing sounds, developing plugins and sharing what he learns along the way.

The idea is straightforward. Nate builds the tools he wants to use in his own productions, puts them to work in the studio, then makes them available to other producers. The plugins, preset collections and production content all grow out of that process, shaped by the practical demands of writing and finishing music.

Nate / Protoculture

Nate’s career spans more than two decades of electronic music. Emerging from South Africa’s psytrance scene, he established Protoculture with the albums Refractions and Circadians, followed by Love Technology and Music Is More Than Mathematics. His sound has evolved through psytrance, progressive trance and progressive house, with melody, atmosphere and detailed production remaining central throughout.

That music has taken him from an international debut at Glastonbury to appearances at Tomorrowland, Ultra Music Festival, Fuji Rock and A State of Trance. Releases through Armada Music and Max Graham’s Rebrand Records brought tracks including “Sun Gone Down”, “Cobalt”, “Topaz” and “Laguna” into the Beatport trance charts and onto dance floors around the world.

His production, remix and engineering credits include work for Armin van Buuren, Paul Oakenfold, Ferry Corsten, Bryan Adams and Johnny Clegg. Alongside Max Graham, his remix of Grace’s “Not Over Yet” reached number one on Beatport’s trance chart, while his remix of Goldfish’s “Cruising Through” earned a South African Music Award nomination.

That experience informs Marula Music at every level. Nate approaches a plugin as someone who will use it to finish a mix, and a preset as someone who needs it to hold its own in an arrangement.

Sound design

Alongside his recording career, Nate has designed sounds for UVI, u-he, Sonic Academy and Plugin Alliance, with contributions ranging from factory soundbanks for UVI instruments to presets for Sonic Academy’s ANA 2 and Brainworx and Knif Audio synthesizers. His work with u-he includes 60 presets in Zebra 3’s factory library, covering basses, leads, pads, sequences and evolving textures.

Marula Music’s own soundware gives him room to explore those ideas further. Collections for instruments such as Diva, Repro and Hive draw on the sounds and techniques developed across his productions, from warm analogue textures and melodic sequences to more intricate, experimental patches.

The aim is to give producers sounds they can build with: useful starting points with enough character to suggest an idea and enough flexibility to become their own.

Sharing the process

Teaching is another part of Nate’s studio work. Through his longstanding contributions to Sonic Academy and the Marula Music YouTube channel, he shares production techniques, sound design, mixing approaches and the details of his workflow. He is also a Bitwig Certified Trainer.

The channel offers a closer look at how he works: exploring instruments, building sounds, testing techniques and explaining the decisions behind them. That same approach carries into the tutorials and studio notes on this site, where the emphasis is on helping producers understand their tools and put them to use.

The record label

Nate also runs Marula Music’s independent record label, releasing progressive trance, melodic techno and progressive house. Alongside his own Protoculture releases, the catalogue includes artists such as Daniel Dee and Profetik, extending the label beyond his own studio.

The label provides a home for music with a clear sense of direction: strong melodies, considered arrangements and room for a track to develop. It keeps releasing records at the centre of Marula Music, alongside the tools and sounds used to make them.

Why Marula

Marula Music remains a one-person studio and plugin shop. Nate develops and tests the tools himself, using his own sessions to judge what works, what needs refining and what gets in the way.

The plugins have a deliberate focus. Each is built around a few useful jobs, with controls that make sense in the middle of a session. The soundware follows the same principle: sounds with a purpose, made by someone who uses them.

Everything connects back to the studio. A production problem becomes a tool. An experiment becomes a preset. A technique worth sharing becomes a tutorial. And the music keeps giving Nate reasons to build what comes next.