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Chris

Hi! I've got a new plugin you can have! These plugins come in Mac AU, and Mac, Windows and Linux VST. They are state of the art sound, have no DRM, and have totally minimal generic interface so you focus on your sounds.

SquareRoot

TL;DW: SquareRoot has new discoveries in soft saturation!

SquareRoot in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Saturation’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
SquareRoot.zip (493k) standalone(AU, VST2)

What if saturation, but not flat-topping, because it was a kind that literally never reaches a ‘top’ but always keeps producing louder output the harder you drive it?

Well, that would defeat the purpose of safety clipping, first of all, but then let’s see what else we can do :)

I don’t think sqrt() commonly gets used for saturation effects, for several reasons. First, it’s wildly inaccurate at tiny values. Second, it won’t safety clip (obviously). Third, if you DO try to use it even though it’s wildly inaccurate at tiny values, it turns and bites you, throwing in a crossover distortion that can be really distracting. You’ve heard it… if you heard LRConvolve, because that uses a square root to compensate for how you’re multiplying one channel by the other.

There’s no solution to these things, but is there a workaround? YES. And it’s called ‘Soar’.

Turns out you can adjust how the square root works to get a smooth contour that still gives you that infinitely-extended softclip. It’s a useful effect, that feels kinda like how our ears respond to loudness. If you have something like a drum track that’s all spikey and doesn’t sound anything like being there, SquareRoot at some level of drive (you can add as much as 12 dB in the plugin, and nearly a hundred dB with BitShiftGain in front of it) will immediately give it that ‘there in the room’ feel while still distinguishing dynamics for you.

And then there’s ‘Soar’ sitting there: all it does is change this adjustment from full smoothness… to uncorrected, nonlinear square root quirkiness. And that throws in controllable amounts of crossover distortion, Class B or AB distortion (since it’s not a sharp edge but increasingly weird curves) and that makes quiet details louder, unnaturally so.

It lets you keep that effect subtle (like the eccentricities of a big push-pull tube amp, or a grungey Hammond B3) or make it really obnoxious: then if you overdrive the input harder, that Soar coloration will become more subtle again, because you’ll have to turn the output down. If even the plain output with no ‘Soar’ is too intense, you get a dry/wet control that should be able to help you find just the right intensity for whatever SquareRoot can produce.

Soar is originally from a story by Mixerman, who used a stray knob to appease a difficult record label exec sitting in on a session. In the story, it was not real. But this is! Right down to the dangers of adding TOO MUCH soar and ruining everything. So, be prudent and don’t soar too much!

This is bonkers for getting retro tones, for simulating acoustic loudness (you can put it in front of Discontinuity for even more loudness cues!) and for giving certain instruments their natural color, like big amps and wonky organs. The effect exists in guitar stompboxes as a notoriously aggro pedal: ZVex’s Machine pedal. But this plugin is not that, it’s a separate effect with its own purposes that happens to be one of the few effects to work with crossover distortion, normally not a popular effect, but now rendered accessible and useful.

I know I’ll be finding uses for all this, and I hope you do too :)

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.

CansAW

TL;DW: CansAW is Chris’s Airwindows room, in a plugin, for headphone mixers.

CansAW in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Utility’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
CansAW.zip (562k) standalone(AU, VST2)

This is pretty straightforward. Remember Cans? Every possible control room sound from compact to huge, adjustable any way you like?

This is the Airwindows presets. That’s all.

By that I mean: I’ve been developing my mix room, where I do all my work, for years. By now I’ve got speakers, subwoofers (stereo), extensive room treatment, multiple mix check positions up to and including a stairwell at the back that leads up to a small hallway, from which you can hear how a mix hits a much larger space and how it’ll work there. I have to close all the doors like to my bedroom to use that mix position, and I’ve shown it on mixing livestreams (though miking it can get hissy as I’m not using live-gig levels here). It’s real-world acoustics used to better document how a mix works in different situations, and it works really well, better than anything you could do over headphones.

And I’ve made a version of Cans that does these exact mix positions, including the hallway mix check, and while it is not as good as real life… it’s not bad, not bad at all. It tells you some of the same things. It worked, in other words.

This is for me as much as you. If it’s out there, even if my house gets flattened by a meteor or perhaps Elon Musk experiencing a nuclear K-hole, and I survive the meteor or madman, and I have a laptop and some headphones, I can work after a fashion :) there’s enough out there whether it’s publically available tracks from my own music or new synths like Six Sines or my perennial fave Surge XT (which can fire one-shot percussion samples off the wavetable osc), and of course I can download ConsoleX just like anybody (making progress on helping Yaeltex put out the control surface I designed!) and that means I, like anybody else, have access to some of the universe of free audio stuff, that universe that’s become so broad that I can even do the music I care about, with just a bunch of downloading open source projects :)

Of course if the meteor gets me all bets are off and you’re gonna have trouble getting ConsoleH out of anybody else. But that’s why I’m burning the midnight oil (well, up-very-early firewood?) to keep making stuff: I’m not done and I’ve got even more exciting stuff than ConsoleX in the works, as well as lots of extra support stuff to put everything in gear, and studio tricks to give audio (that can be sampled and re-used) that hasn’t been heard right for decades. Starting to figure all that out, and I hope I can convey my enthusiasm.

For today, here’s CansAW. You can get to any setting in it using Cans (it’s all Room D, for a start). But each setting is dialed in as exactly as I could get it, using real acoustical audio for reference, in the mix environment I’ve been developing for years. If I had access to all the mix rooms in the world I’d give you the approximation of those as well, but here’s my place, in the box :)

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.

BezEQ

TL;DW: BezEQ is a strange, alien three-band shelving EQ.

BezEQ in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Filter’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
BezEQ.zip (499k) standalone(AU, VST2)

You don’t have an EQ anything like this. Nobody does. This is guaranteed new.

The reason is, nobody with audio training would try to apply Bezier curves to audio reconstruction (since it doesn’t make sense, though it’s nice and efficient to do), and if you did you’d get my latest DeRez which doesn’t work like a normal frequency crush and so that would scare more people off, and then if you tried to use two DeRezzes in series as brickwall filters for a three-band shelving EQ, you’d so quickly run into problems (for instance, with test tones) that you’d immediately run away, never to return, knowing it would be impossible to get away with it.

And more fool anybody who did try ALL of these things and then gave up… because this is a hell of a thing, and now it’s mine, which means now it’s yours. I do Patreon so it doesn’t matter if one of my plugins is scorned as an EQ and behaves terribly in testing. I can put it out anyway! And even explore the idea of building it into ConsoleH… but that’s in development, and BezEQ is yours right now.

If you keep Treble, Mid and Bass exactly the same volume (any value, the settings will match) it will behave quite perfectly. Doesn’t matter what the crossovers do. They’re assembled subtractively so they’ll add up to perfect, every time, if they’re set to ‘flat’. I often do that with ‘general purpose’ EQs or with things like StoneFire: it’s good to have ‘flat’ be really, really free from issues. It’s the opposite of breaking things into an FFT transform or an mp3 and then reconstructing them from the (limited) data.

Then, if you shut off Treble, the output is DeRez3 using the X control between Treble and Mid to set the cutoff.

And if you shut off Treble and Mid, the output is DeRez3 using the X control between Mid and Bass.

And if you shut off everything BUT Treble, it’s the dry signal MINUS the first DeRez3. It’s only the highs from what would’ve been a de-rezzed, pseudo-brickwall cutoff.

And if you have Treble AND Bass, you have that plus the derezzed Bass, which is what remains after the Mid goes through another ‘filter’ that’s not really a filter. Same with if you only have Mid: it’s derezzed treble-removed, but with the other derez subtracted.

Except you’ll quickly learn that none of these are clean crossovers at all: you’ll get a strange overtone that comes out at the filter cutoff and acts weird. You can add a LOT of deep bass and an extra tone, like a ring mod, through boosting bass and adjusting that cutoff. You can add bass through that extra tone by CUTTING bass and adjusting the cutoff. It’s a bizarre toy but it works predictably and has its own sound, to love or hate.

And that’s not even getting into when you do this, and then make the cutoffs fight each other by setting TxM very low and MxB very high, causing the distortions to distort and interact… you can get into a lot of trouble with this, and so totally reinvent the sound that it becomes unrecognizable.

And then dial it back to as subtle as you like, simply by making Treble, Mid and Bass be closer to each other.

Have fun and don’t say I didn’t warn you :)

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.

LRConvolve

TL;DW: LRConvolve multiplies each channel by the other!

LRConvolve in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Utility’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
LRConvolve.zip (483k) standalone(AU, VST2)

This experiment created a monster. And yet it’s so simple…

The idea was, can you convolve one channel by the other. L convolves R. And, since multiplication is commutative, R can convolve L right back! And what do you get when you do this?

Swedish Chef from Hell, apparently! See the example video (or convolve any vocal with a simple 1k sine tone in the other channel). But why is it doing this terrible thing?

When you use a sine wave as one of the channels, it is multiplying the one by the other. (Technically I have a method for taking the square root of the result so it doesn’t simply change the density of the sound too much: this is not complicated, it’s just making sure the positives and negatives are still what they ‘should’ be.) And when you’re modulating the polarity of a vocal track at audio rates… you can get very weird distortions of the tonality and vowels.

It gets worse: if you use lower tones, you can go full Dalek. That’s because this is a nasty form of a ring modulator, when you ask it to be. I’ll be working on some more variations, it’ll give me something to do :)

But what happens when you get bolder? For instance, convolve drums with a heavy guitar, or a race car? Not what you’d think. Remember, polarity flips at the frequency of whatever normal sound you feed in. If there’s silence, everything will go silent. But if there’s noisy drum sounds, it’ll turn everything noisy: you won’t hear the guitar, and then if the guitar’s midrangey, you also won’t hear the bass on the drums. It really hybridizes the sound to become the worst of both worlds, and this particular version is specialized to find the most extreme combination of both sounds, which will bring out the noisiest aspects of both. If you had a track that was just positive (or negative) control voltages or envelopes, you would indeed get a normal VCA out of this. …but what fun is that?

This plugin has no controls and will show up as a blank space, possibly with its name written on it. All you do is run one thing into one side, and something else into the other (perhaps with track routing: it’s simple to do in Reaper, just send to a track with this on it). If you send mono to it, you will get an odd sound which is the sound full-wave rectified, because the negative wave times negative wave equals positive (because of the square root, no other change happens). If you send a completely out of phase signal to it, you get the sound full-wave rectified only to the negative side (note that it doesn’t clip off the sections of audio being rectified, so you can’t ‘split’ into positive and negative waves this way, they would sum to ‘no audio’).

There will be offshoots of this that are more normal. This is just the raw craziness of it in its purest form. If this is the plugin for you, you know who you are! And are probably already playing with it and not listening to me anymore.

So, carry on, and I’ll come up with some more variations that do different things :)

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.

Older Posts

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Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club

altruistmusic.com

Dave Robertson and the Kiss List

Decibelia Nix

Gamma1734

GuitarTraveller

ivosight.com – courtesy Johnny Wishoff

Podigy Podcast Editing Service

Super Synthesis Eurorack Modules

Very Rich Bandcamp

If you’re pledging the equivalent of three or more plugins per year, I’ll happily link you on the sidebar, including a link to your music or project! Message me to ask.