Airwindows

ConsoleX

TL;DW: ConsoleX is the fully featured, biggest Airwindows console.

github.com/airwindows/ConsoleXChannel/releases
github.com/airwindows/ConsoleXBuss/releases
These are the Channel and Buss plugins that make up the ConsoleX system
github.com/airwindows/ConsoleXPre/releases
This is just the tone shaping of ConsoleX, standalone, to be used as additional tone shaping or with other Console versions

If you haven’t got Version 0.0.5, go and download it again! There are still some bugs that seem to be graphics-related, but this is a critical fix! Without this new version, the ConsoleX plugins won’t remember their settings. There’s a lot to all this and that whole section of code got by me. Remember, when I tell you I’m out of my depth and doing something too hard for me, I mean it!
Version 0.0.3 has the ability to save state per instance, thanks to baconpaul’s code for airwin2rack and Consolidated showing me how. That means now you can start using it while I continue to fix crash bugs and the likes, as it can operate like a real plugin at last.
Version 0.0.5 checks some array bounds more rigorously. Fingers crossed!

ConsoleX.zip (2M)
This is a set of standalone retro/generic ConsoleX plugins (AU, VST2) and also includes example files for using AirwindowsGlobals to configure the main (JUCE-based GUI) plugins, and a folder containing the ReaScripts to set up Airwindowmation on Reaper. Note that the non-GUI retro plugins still have 36 controls and may not all fit on your screen, so I can’t guarantee they will be useable in all situations. If you can’t reach the ‘Fader’ slider at the bottom, that will pose challenges.

ConsoleX is my ultimate mixing system, whether for retro vibe or the next big thing, and I’ll try to explain what I’ve built into it. There’s too much here to tell all at once, so here are the highlights.

The basic signal flow uses Stonefire’s Kalman filters combined with Air3 for an air band, and applies the dynamics you’d find on a big-console channel strip, but parallel across Stone and Fire bands.That means it’s easy to apply simple compression that still lets sub-lows through, or to tighten the deep bass with gating, or to do a variety of wild dynamics tricks. It’s like two big-console dynamics sections in one (or, broad-band EQ-like tone shaping with a difference).

Four EQ bands lend themselves to sharp, sonorous areas of focus. When not in use it’s like no processing is there, but dig in and the bass, low mid, high mid and treble really thump, punch, honk and glitter. The EQ design’s similar to some things about ToTape7 and 8’s head bump, but more adaptable. Each band is fed by raw sound pre-compression, so they saturate the audio with peak energy, but they gate along with Stone or Fire so you can still clamp ’em if needed.

There’s a special trick for those willing to run at elevated sample rates: the lowpass and highpass are distributed, spread out through the signal flow of the whole plugin. They bypass when turned all the way down (these things follow SSL rules, like no highpass or lowpass being counterclockwise, and the narrowest Q of the EQs being counterclockwise) but when you crack open the lowpass it begins doing a supersonic filtering that’ll directly address aliasing through the plugin and the whole mix, while allowing nonlinearities to produce the harmonics you’d get off analog gear.

There’s a special knob, Discontinuity. It’s available as a standalone plugin, but ConsoleX puts Discontinuity on every channel and on the 2-buss. Hard counterclockwise means you’re applying air nonlinearity as if your sound topped out at 70 dB: in other words, practically none. Middle is around 100 dB and you’ll begin to feel the effects. Beyond that, you’re getting into air distortion beyond the hugest PA systems, just because it might be fun. This is your key to making stuff sound huge, sound loud, sound completely beyond what we’re used to hearing from DAWs of the last thirty years. Treat it like dynamics: wisely, and with caution. It’s there to set the peak apparent loudness of your track.

There’s a vibey meter based on what I learned from Airwindows Meter, but instead of producing charts and measurements to study, it produces a light show. Blue light represents sonority at whatever volume those peaks are at (quiet is at the center, clipping is the edges of the meter). Where Meter draws red and green dots on white to represent peaks brighter or mellower than the optimum, the ConsoleX meter sustains those lights and reverses them, against a background of black. That means if you see red light, that’s bassy. If you see green flashes, that’s treble. And if the meter lights up a brilliant cyan, that’s the bright end of maximum intensity. So you can watch for red or purple if you’re looking for bass, greens and cyans if you want brightness, blue for the loudest parts, and you won’t get over-analytical about it. The ConsoleX meter shows you roughly how loud the peaks are, and their character, in a way you can vibe to without losing mixing focus.

There’s a ConsoleXPre plugin, which is all the tone shaping stuff of the Channels and only lacks the Console processing. This is for if you want to run ToTape7 or 8 on channels for things like heavy guitars, but you want to condition the sound going TO the tape, and then also have full control over the sound coming back OFF the tape. There’s great missives and narratives by the ever-respected Slipperman on how to do just this, and it absolutely works in the box using ToTape and these plugins. You can also run things like reverbs into other full ConsoleXChannels, by putting Console9Buss at the top of that aux channel, adding the reverb or what have you, then back to ConsoleXChannel to fully control and augment the processing (that’s something I saw Chris Lord-Alge doing in videos, and it’s fantastic)

Lastly, every single thing I’ve mentioned exists exactly the same way on the Buss plugin (decoding the output of the Channel plugins, please maintain unity gain between Channel and Buss) so anything you can do on a channel you can do on the 2-buss. This drastically changes the character of the mix, making ConsoleX future-proof: it ought to be able to handle anything you can dream up.

And then, I’m introducing AirwindowsGlobals, a user-accessible configuring text file that lets you do completely outrageous things with the look of all Airwindows Pamplejuce-based plugins. And you’d think that would mean ‘the ConsoleX plugins’, except that Airwindows Meter already works with AirwindowsGlobals. Surprise! There will be more.

And for my fellow Reaper users, with the help of Airwindows fan Robert Kennedy, I bring you Airwindowmation. This is a Reaper script, that should work for Mac and Windows directly if you can install ReaLearn and get Reaper scripts working on your machine and sort out the trickiness of control surfaces. I simplified it as much as I could. It is not actually automation, it’s grouping. You can take a bank of faders (like the 12 long-throw faders on my Yaeltex dedicated ConsoleX control surface) and colorcode them, and then have a given colored fader automatically control the ‘Fader’ parameter on ALL ConsoleXChannel instances with a matching track color, on the fly. Much like how you can update AirwindowsGlobals on the fly. It’s deeply spontaneous, which I think is essential for modern human music-making.

I’ll be doing some livestreams for the purpose of walking through mixes using ConsoleX, and will resume regular plugin posting in January at some point. I look forward to sharing all this with everyone… and diving into the music making like I haven’t been able to do for years. Join me!

ConsoleX has too many controls to fit into Airwindows Consolidated, or the VCV Rack Module.
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.

Date December 25, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 13 Comments

kPlate140

TL;DW: kPlate140 is a next-generation Airwindows plate reverb.

kPlate140 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
kPlate140.zip (593k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Time for the big plate!

kPlate140 is a lot like the smaller version, kPlate240, to the point that you might ask, what’s up with that? Can’t you simply make the 240 version sustain a little longer, maybe dial in some EQ, and not need to have a whole separate plugin?

Much like kPlate240, kPlate140 is a 5×5 Householder matrix with a plate-style delay density, Pear filters, and the use of SubTight. Where a lot of reverbs out there will be different EQ settings etc. on one basic algorithm (or a small number of them), it’s true that it’s got the same sliders doing the same things and if you can use one you can use the other… but the way these are designed involves generating thousands or hundreds of thousands of possible Householder matrices and testing them to try and work out what would give the best sound. That means they’ve got better during the time I’ve developed the technique… but it also means each new ‘best algorithm’ is unique. Sometimes there’s a lucky break, like the original Galactic one (a 4×4) that was used again for Galactic3, sometimes not so much like the original kCathedral that people felt was metallic.

And then when you’re trying to do a literal plate which very much has its own sound qualities… and some years ago I did build a DIY real-world physical plate reverb, so I’m familiar with the sound though I couldn’t get it up to EMT140 quality and didn’t keep it… well, dialing in the sound involves getting all that stuff tuned up uniquely to the plugin in question.

kPlate140 isn’t meant to duplicate kPlate240. My take on the gold foil reverb is that it’s cloudier, more understated: from reports of people who use both sorts, it’s got a thing of its own but it’s the big 375 pound monster (600 pounds packed for shipping) that really gets people’s attention. And so, kPlate140 takes a different angle, with all of its parts tuned for that flashier, deeper, more fiery sound that’s not part of the more subdued 240.

140 plates come in all sounds and varieties: much like with the earlier attempt at plate reverbs, kPlateA through D, each one will sound different. kPlate140’s the one that is yours, much like kPlate240 is. I’m hoping this will come in handy in situations where you’re looking for a plate reverb plugin, but are going for that BIG sound. You get to have both! Have fun bathing in reverb :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.

Date December 22, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

kPlate240

TL;DW: kPlate240 is for the texture of smaller, gold foil reverb.

kPlate240 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
kPlate240.zip (596k) standalone(AU, VST2)

kPlate240 is the result of combining many recent Airwindows developments, with other stuff often too strange to work directly as plugins. Mind you, you can still have plugins like SubTight, the Pear filter and so on, but if I was able to track who was using what, you’d see a million instances of plugins like kPlateA and nobody doing anything with SubTight, and most of the uses of Pear would be inside other plugins like ConsoleMC.

But sometimes, there’s a purpose to achieve, and some odd plugin turns out to be able to get the sound, and in this case the purpose was simple. Both the gold-foil 240 plate, and the big 140, do not do damping in the sense a digital reverb does damping (by turning down the regeneration, without which any digital reverb gets very short indeed). Instead, they have a big physical panel that’s brought near the vibrating plate, and it couples acoustically with the plate to damp it. But this is far from linear! And it’ll be distorting low frequencies preferentially, nonlinearly, and the whole thing will produce a sound that’s instantly recognized, but is really a bit of a mess. And it seems to me the gold foil version is all the more messy, even though it’s portable. It’s this lush cloudy thing, darker, oddly murky, and how would you go about making that sound?

In this case, it’s with a custom 5×5 Householder matrix (already an unusual Airwindows technique, and a set of delay times that haven’t been used before, with a plate-style delay density), those Pear filters, and SubTight. The development was twitchy, making controls like Regen restricted to a narrower range of adjustment so things wouldn’t blow up. And eventually kPlate240 took shape.

This is not the big awesome famous plate reverb, it’s a different sound like the gold-foil little brother. The idea is that kPlate240 can be tucked into mix spaces and won’t dominate, but will cause a sonic bloom that can be helpful. It’s a plate sound that’s meant to be used with as much damping as you like: on top of that, as a more modern Airwindows reverb, you can use the DeRez control to both restrict the treble of the reverb, and scale the verb size up (lowering DeRez does both these things). Because DeRez is in play, it will work in consistent ways at any sample rate, even silly high rates: the higher your native DAW sample rate, the more ‘steps’ you’ll get in the DeRez as it reconstructs the waveform using Bezier curves (which I find is an interesting-sounding texture for reverbs).

Predelay gives you plenty of range for ‘slapback, only it’s a damped plate reverb’ sounds. Wetness lets you go from dry, to both at full volume, to all-wet. It sounds surprisingly coherent at full wet, but that’s because the damping plate cleans it up a lot. Would a 240 be your only reverb? Perhaps not, but when you can have the option from the click of a mouse, why not? Might not be the gold standard for big reverb, but this should find uses :)

Date December 15, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

Cans

TL;DW: Cans is a room simulator for headphone mixers.

Cans in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Utility’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2: now on WinArm64 thanks to baconpaul!)
Cans.zip (581k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Lots of people out there are stuck mixing on headphones, whether it’s due to bad acoustics or noise complaints or simply not having a high-quality monitoring situation. After all, even if you put together speakers as revealing as NS10s, the amplification and acoustic environment have to support them, plus you’ve got no hope of extending the monitoring to the bass without serious subwoofers and even more acoustic treatment, and this quickly expands to become unreasonable. So lots of people are stuck with headphones.

And why is that so hard to make work? A simple reason. Peak energy shapes the whole character of the sound (or lack of character, all too often these days). And in a good control room, it’s not just about making everything dead. Diffusion and room geometry play an important role, and the sound always bounces around because that’s what happens out in reality. We hear sounds in the context of a listening environment, and through this very specific reverberation, the peak energy makes itself known. But over headphones, especially great headphones that are free of artifacts and resonances, the peak energy just gets right by you. It happens too quickly and is gone before you register it.

In a great control room you get a better sense of what lives in the peak energy, by how sound bounces off those expensive diffusors and fancy wall geometries, giving you that enveloping acoustic space without it further confusing your ear. And there’s people out there ready to sell (or rent!) you the pretend versions of various ultimate rooms, perhaps with pictures included so you can pretend you were there. But what if you just got an enveloping acoustic space or five, that you can bend into whatever shape suits your work… for free?

Airwindows Cans is not the same thing that’s in the Monitoring plugins. It uses some of the same techniques (crossfade, allpass filters) but runs new reverb algorithms that haven’t been used before, because it took days of computer time to grind out these five new verb spaces, all tailored for this one purpose.

StudioA is the smallest control room, and StudioE the largest, but this is not simply a rescaling of the algorithm: each one is a unique space, designed to best represent its purpose. You’ll hear the room size most clearly in the way it reshapes the bass. The Diffuse control works like adding more acoustic diffusion to the room (technically, it lets you swap any comb filter for a corresponding allpass filter). Damping provides the upholstery: studio control rooms are not often echoey and ‘live’, and as you turn Damping down you put up more drapes and acoustic treatment, drying up the highs and mids of the room. Crossfade brings the stereo into a more centered place or causes it to swap sides mid-reverb, and Dry/Wet controls how much of the ambience you’re including.

Setting everything to halfway should be a good starting point for headphone monitoring, but you can go wild trying different perspectives. For instance, in real life I have a mix check position that’s upstairs in a hallway, well away from the speakers (and I’ve shown this on mixing streams before). In Cans, you get this by picking a larger room size, livening up Damping with a higher setting, and going more wet so you hear more of the room sound.

You can also, as I demonstrate in the video, just use it as a pretend drum room (or piano room, what have you: a studio space that’s not a big hall). Because the early reflections are closely tied to the raw sound, Cans merges with the sound more than typical reverbs, as it’s trying to do that rather than sound like a room of its own. Even if not mixing on headphones, this can find use!

But if you are mixing on headphones, the idea is always to find that setting in Cans that works for you in letting you hear and interpret everything in the mix, dial in your sounds and levels, and then turn it OFF before exporting. Because maybe you won’t be listened to on other headphones… or maybe you’ll be played at clubs, or live events, for crowds… or maybe the future means having your music played through listeners having their OWN version of Cans, or some other invented environment you can’t control, in which case layering your pet monitoring environment onto all those places will turn into a muddy mess.

But if you’re headphone mixing through your personal settings for Cans that make your favorite music sound like it should, and then you export your music without that interpretation built in, other people can get the most out of what you made over anything from a big club sound system, to a PA, to their own ‘virtual space’ that makes their music sound the way they want it to sound. Because Cans is about trying to give you a picture of all the energy in your mix, not just what’s obvious over headphones. And if you find sound spaces you love using Cans, try building those sounds partly out of aggressive ‘room sound making’ on submixes and individual instruments, and then partly out of a much more subdued take on Cans on the whole 2-buss… and then turn it OFF for export.

After all, if you went to mix your work in a world-class studio that reveals everything, you give people the mix that environment let you do. You don’t just put up mics in the back of the room and give people THAT :)

Hope you find Cans useful. Remember, if you need to make a lot of stuff much more ambient with Cans, do part of it in the mix on stems and instruments, and do part of it on the 2-buss (or monitor chain) to simulate your perfect control room, and then turn the 2-buss Cans off to get the real mix!

Date December 8, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

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