Airwindows Plugins Starter Kit
This is the Airwindows Plugin Starter Kit. It contains 11 plugins (if you count Console as its own kind of plugin) and you should be able to make ’em do just about anything musical you could want. This includes many forms of ‘analog emulation’ and a great deal of creative mix exploration. There’s a video explaining many things you can do, and I’ve got two tracks up on SoundCloud (featured at the top of the page) that demonstrate a heavy rock song mixed entirely on my fully analog system (MOTU>Heritage Audio>Heritage Audio hardware buss comp>Lavry ADC) and then the same thing done entirely ITB using the Starter Kit (not even all the plugins). It’s not meant to be an utter and exact clone, but the Starter Kit is basically just as good as the expensive analog rig tonally, even on a mix designed to get the most out of the analog approach (no sound is so much as touched digitally in the analog mix: it’s basically using Logic as an iZ RADAR)
The downloads of the full songs are FLACs of the 24/96, on the one hand the raw capture from the Lavry and on the other hand a simple bounce from Logic using the Starter Kit. So if you want to subject these claims to extreme scrutiny, that’s possible. (maybe I should have a mix-off and put the Logic project file up somewhere: a mix-off where you can ONLY use the Starter Kit. We can see how extreme the variations can become!)
These are the plugins included in the Starter Kit: the video goes into detail on why these perhaps audacious choices were made. It’s not arbitrary: this is meant to serve professionals and also to guide newbies towards mix enlightenment.
EQ: Baxandall, Capacitor2, Focus
Dynamics: Pressure5, ClipOnly2, DeBess
Utility: PurestGain, Monitoring
Analogifying: Interstage
Ambience: Galactic, Verbity
Console System: Console7Buss, Console7Channel, Console7Cascade
(edit: I have added Channel9! Consider it as part of the Analogifying category :) )
If you’ve never gotten into Airwindows Console, or Airwindows Plugins, this is the time. I’m demoing this kit on Logic Pro X, which is now available from Apple on a 90-day free trial, but the plugins are provided in signed AU and VST2.4 form for Mac, Windows64 and Linux (x86 and ARM64 for Raspberry Pi). It shouldn’t be that hard to translate everything I’m doing to any DAW that supports generic-interface plugins. Most importantly, if you looked over the hundreds of plugins Airwindows produces, and wondered where on earth to start, here is your answer! Start here.
Note there are no tape plugins or any name-brand ’emulations’ of anything. You should not be starting with that stuff. Fight me :D
If you have other questions you can post to this thread about the Starter Kit, or show up to a Monday Q&A session, or get in touch with me some other way and I’ll try to help. The Starter Kit is meant to be very approachable, so it should help you start to get pleasing results provided you know what kinds of sounds you want to make! :)
All this is made possible by my Patreon. If it turns out that these free and open source plugins help you out a lot, and especially if you start wanting other more special-purpose ‘kits’ or still more plugins, you might want to support my Patreon! That’s how I’m able to do this full-time.
Thank you, and I hope you enjoy the Airwindows Plugins Starter Kit! If you want more plugins, there are hundreds, but this is a good start. If you need the original version of the starter kit, before the signed plugins and all, it can still be downloaded at OldStarterKit.zip(5.6M)
Genius Chris, this is gonna be brilliant! Will it turn into a series?
Out of your character plugins, I think I like Calibre the best. Not sure exactly what it does, but it feels more like an auto-eq, a simple but yet useful one. If you push it to the maximum, you have to invert it, but it works!
Cider feels like air, but without the nasty distorted noise that more air plugins give.
Not sure what Luxor and Apicolypse do. But Neverland is a very good deharsher, probably one of the best I’ve tried, ever.
Still hoping for a Soothe, buddy! But keep up the great work, some of the best plugins out there by far!
Chris, your plugins are genuinely life changing. I no longer have to spend hours (more like days) trying to get some warmth and clarity out of my mixes. As soon as I turned on ToTape6 I knew right away you absolutely know what you are doing!
I’m now a patron, and wondering if you please clear something up for me, someone who is new to the Console style plugins. I know this question isn’t a new one, again it’s about sub mix groups. Specifically would I have a PurestConsoleBuss on every submix group that then feeds to another PCB on the main output?
I read some people do, some people don’t. But would love to know what you would do. Because in this video it looks like you only have one instance of PCB.
Sorry for the dumb question. I don’t think I’m half as smart as most people on this website. Keep up the great work.
Hey Chris, i just found out about your plugins, amazing work can believe how good they are but I have the same question as others I see. With the console plugin, the PCB is intended for just the summing bus or for all busses.
I mix in Reaper and in Reaper we have a very buss centric workflow(mainly because is so easy to implement it.)
I have busses for drums for vocals for efx for guitar … You got my point.
Should I use PCC on all tracks except the buss and put the PCB on the mixbus? Or I should use PCC on all busses and put the PCB on mixbuss or I should use PCC on all tracks and PCB on all busses including the mixbuss?
@kain
This is a good resource:
http://beatdruid.com/index.php?title=Airwindows:_Using_Console
This is very cool! I have all your plugins sorted out into different folders based on their types already and use them all the time, but seeing what you consider to be a good starting place is very insightful. Thank you! I would also love to see you put together other collections designed for different uses. I don’t know exactly how that could work but a “compression”, or “analog”, or “distortion/harmonics” Series could be cool.
Chris, thanks for what you do.
I don’t think the “I” in the logic channel strip is for phase flip. I’m pretty sure it stands for “input monitoring”. It affects whether monitoring is on or off during tracking.
I dont know how i got here, i was just mindlesly flowting thru the internet..
Anyhow, i tried starter kit and i must say that is works straight out of the box(.zip), even if FL Studio 11 is not displaying some of them so i dont have controls, but in vsthost.exe is and i can use and test them and they are quite nice sounding i must say. Desk and dark are not showing itself in Fl, only wrapper edge with properties. Too bad.
I guess ill have to check out all of them.
Cheers Chris!
とてもすばらしいプラグインです。
These are amazing plugins. Is there a tutorial on how to open them in Xcode, as I just get errors with them all? Obviously, I am doing something wrong, but maybe there is a tutorial on this?
Thanks
good