For gospel musicians, high-quality sample libraries made for church performance were hard to come by - until Daryl built Wise Sound. Armed with creativity instead of costly gear, he proved you don’t need a $3,000 keyboard to change an industry

Since starting at SendOwl in August I’ve noticed a trend: some of our most successful sellers sell audio samples.

For those unfamiliar with the term, an audio sample is a short piece of recorded sound. It could be someone talking, a bird chirping or a bit of a song that is then used to build new electronic music or sound effects. Since learning more about them I’ve started to think of them as ingredients in a recipe - it often takes many ingredients to make a cake and different artists will use different ingredients in different ways and, critically, without ingredients you don’t have a cake at all.

In other words, without sample sellers, we wouldn’t really have electronic music.

Eager to learn more about the world of sample libraries I sat down in late September with Daryl Wise, the charismatic founder of Wise Sounds, which supplies high-quality sample libraries to church musicians around the world.

According to Daryl, it all started when, as a church musician in West Virginia, he couldn’t afford the $2,000–$4,000 professional keyboards that defined gospel performance.

Instead of giving up, he improvised: using a modest MIDI keyboard and his computer, he began crafting his own sound libraries tailored to the style of worship he knew best. Today, Daryl’s sounds power worship services across denominations, and his customers include musicians who play for the giants of gospel music like Kirk Franklin, Donnie McClurkin, Fred Hammond, and Yolanda Adams.

Solving a Gap No One Else Would Fill

Back in 2015, Daryl saw a glaring hole in the sample library market. While electronic music producers had endless choices of software instruments, church musicians had very few. The leading provider, he recalls, “felt like Apple. They’d cornered the market and could cut corners.” Daryl decided to create something better, and for years he made sample sets the way he liked to play them.

The turning point came when he began asking his audience directly what they wanted. Sometimes he released updates the same day a customer requested a new feature or sound. One visually impaired musician from South Africa wrote to tell him that Wise Sound’s interface was the first his screen reader could navigate smoothly—something Daryl had never designed for but now intentionally maintains.

“Now, I don’t finish a product until I’ve heard from my customers,” he says. “That’s where the real success comes from.”

Moving Platforms, Moving Faster

Wise Sound’s growth also depended on the tools that could handle its unique demands, among them the large file sizes required by sample sellers. Initially, he used FastSpring to host and sell his files but after they changed their model and pricing Daryl asked fellow creators where they sold their sample libraries. A friend on Discord recommended SendOwl.

Like all merchants Daryl didn’t want to risk disrupting the experience for his buyers and he didn’t want to have to learn a whole new system but Daryl says the move “was probably one of the best things I’ve done for my company.”

He migrated within a week and ultimately found SendOwl simpler to use and highly reliable.

Growing Pains of a One-Person Business

Daryl has been full-time for three years, running every part of Wise Sound himself. His biggest challenge now is market saturation: most of his audience already owns his libraries, so sales spikes come only when he releases something new. “If I don’t release something fresh, it doesn’t matter how many sales I run,” he explains.

To reach new listeners, he experiments constantly with marketing—Facebook ads, Instagram, YouTube, and niche forums—and dreams of producing video sessions with influential gospel keyboardists in his city, Columbus. “That’s how the big keyboard companies do it,” he says. “If someone well known plays your sounds, that drives sales.”

Lessons Learned

Looking back, Daryl names his biggest early mistake as designing for himself instead of for his customers. It was a perfect way to start, but it wasn’t sustainable because there was a limit to the number of musicians looking for exactly what he was looking for.

This is where his practice of consulting his customers stems from: the realization that in order to grow he needed to talk to his customers and understand needs outside of his own.

Daryl has also learned the importance of knowing when to step away when he has a particularly challenging day or moment.

“When you can’t fix it right away, putting yourself into a panic attack isn’t the best option,” he says. “I turn off the devices, enjoy life at face value, and come back when I’m ready.”

The Road Ahead: What Daryl wishes he knew now

Wise Sound has already transformed the way thousands of church musicians play. But, there is plenty of room to grow. There is a world in which he’s working with bigger name acts and getting the word out about what he is doing is a lot easier. In fact, the thing he is the most curious about are the marketing techniques used by the entrepreneurs, solopreneurs and creators operating within a niche who have none the less managed to really break through.

For now, Daryl keeps building, listening, and iterating; turning his own problem as a church musician into a resource for a global community.

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