Distance3
TL;DW: Distance3 combines the best parts of Distance and Discontinuity.
Distance3 in Airwindows Consolidated(CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Distance3.zip(509k) standalone(AU, VST2)
By request from my livestreams, let’s jump right back into the Discontinuity thing, but this time combined with a much older plugin: the original Distance!
This is a kind of plugin meant to darken the sound and make stuff sound really far away. Originally, I was thinking something that could take all the highs out and accentuate rumble, like turning a sound into the thunder version of itself. And so the first Distance worked basically as an EQ: three stacked stages of processing that combined to make stuff huge, kind of like my monitoring plugin SubsOnly.
Thing is, that doesn’t have any nonlinearities to speak of in it, not the kind that happen in the real world over that much air. And at the time I was working on a Console version called Atmosphere, and thought I had a handle on bringing in that kind of nonlinearity. And so the next one was Distance2… but it lost some of the purity and depth of Distance, but didn’t sound quite the way I wanted. It was the best I could do at the time, and is still there if you’re interested in different sorts of darken/distort.
And then I brought in Discontinuity and was working on it in livestreams and someone mentioned, what if it was part of Distance? And the interesting thing is that Discontinuity also gets its sound from… three stages of processing, stacked. (as in, not side-by-side but in series, one after the other.)
Anytime you look at a situation like that, you can think to yourself: well, I could run these two plugins on after the other, but what if I interleaved the stages? One of Distance, one of Discontinuity, another Distance, another Discontinuity, and so on? Surely that would combine the effects in a more interesting way, merge them into a new distinct thing as they work on each other in turn?
And so here is Distance3. It goes right back to the tone quality of Distance, but it has all of the ‘loud vibe’ from Discontinuity, and outperforms either of them if you need the synthesis of both. There’s probably lots of uses for this and my hope is that it’ll be very easy to find those uses: if a thing has to be convincingly far away and you’ve already got reverb and ambience taken care of, Distance3 should immediately get you there in the best possible way.
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.
A tiny little bit of this on all channels instantly makes a song sound like it’s being played live. I mean a *really* tiny amount. It adds a texture which I’ve never heard out of a plugin before – thanks Chris, that’s exactly what I needed. This is gold.
Always wanted something like this!
This might sound strange, but is there any value in incorporating modulation based on the varying speed of sound caused by changes in air temperature and humidity?
Consider a concert on a nearby island. The air temperature and humidity there could differ slightly from the mainland, and the air over the water may also differ slightly in temperature and humidity from the island and the mainland. What effect is there on the sound?
It’s well-known that airplanes sound louder in cold weather, a related phenomena to this idea of modulation caused by slight variations in temperature and humidity as the sound propagates.