Airwindows

Loud

TL:DW; Distortion and demolition of air molecules, modeled.

Here’s something rather special. What if you could distort like air molecules distort?

I studied recordings of competitive tractor pulls, of Space Shuttle launches, various recordings that represented the way air can be mangled and break apart. The result is Loud… a step into a much louder world. It’s a distortion that can be slammed to unthinkable ‘heart of a supernova’ dB levels, but can also be subtly introduced to give the sonic coloration of a big LOUD noise in open air. Makes for a very interesting ‘glue’ at zero boost!

Here’s how it’s done: rather than apply a consistent transfer function like a normal distortion, Loud knows whether you’re compressing the air, or letting it rebound. And if it’s snapping back, it can do it with the speed of lightning, but if it’s compressing, the air can be squished to practically solid, increasing heat. This extreme nonlinearity is why Loud sounds the way it does. It can sit on a whole mix to give it scope and authority, or it can be pushed harder on individual tracks like guitars and drums to amp up the ferocity.

Remember, if you’ve got it totally fuzzing out, you are probably already beyond any sound level achievable by human means. The completely fried sound of cranked-up Loud is not meant to seem like acoustic phenomena as we know it. It turns up that loud because I grew up reading Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, and because in no other way can you accurately emulate a Disaster Area concert. :)

If you like me inventing things like this, support my Patreon. It’s over the funding goal of $600, meaning that I will start to release the Kagi for-pay plugins, one a month, starting with Iron Oxide 5 (the newest version, never seen before!). But there are other goals to reach, too: at $800 I will begin open sourcing these plugins under the MIT license, and at $1000 I will release two of the Kagi plugins a month—twice as fast! Sky’s basically the limit. And for today, as a token of good will, I bring you the loudest noise in the universe :)

Date April 23, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 8 Comments

Speed-King-Izing Axis Longboards

I’m getting together a huge (18) pile of new plugins to make, including the mighty Iron Oxide 4, and also dealing with a YouTube issue where someone’s tried to copyright strike white noise generated in a ToTape4 video, and trying to fix my porch. But I’ve got time to share some drum pedal experiments with you!

This is how to make Axis longboards ‘feel’ more like Ludwig Speed King pedals, but without the squeaks and vintageness. It’s all about the geometry of the linkages, and works great: you should see right away how this works, and how it’s done. If you have questions, ask! :)

Things are looking good for May to be my first month of releasing the premium, Kagi-era plugins. As long as the Patreon is still over $600 when May begins, we’re good to go, and probably it will stay at least at that level from now on (not like I’m going to stop being Chris from Airwindows or anything ;) )

The next stages of the Patreon are reaching $800 (where I begin open-sourcing what’s been put out already, plus my templates for making all the plugins) and $1000 (where I start putting out the premium plugins TWICE as fast, two a month, on top of everything else I’m releasing). It’s exciting to see where this is going!

Hope the glimpse into lever-hacking (for that’s how you Speed-King-Ize an Axis pedal) was fun! Next one is an alternate hi-hat sound, an unusually good dark LOUD hat for roughly $43 plus a pair of tin-snips. Then the flood of new plugins resumes :)

Date April 18, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

High Impact

TL:DW; Grit and punch without fatness.

HighImpact

Sometimes it’s all in the name.

High Impact has been one of the Airwindows secret weapons for a long time. It’s a pretty basic idea: know how Density distorts and makes audio huge and fat, and Drive distorts and doesn’t make stuff as fat? High Impact answers the question, ‘what if you could distort and not make things fatter AT ALL’.

This is not EQ I’m talking about, though it can come off like EQ depending on what you feed into it. High Impact combines a distortion and anti-distortion circuit to reshape the transfer function of the audio, as follows: crank it up, and quiet subtle samples aren’t turned up much. Then medium samples are turned up a LOT, and then the loudest samples are distorted and hit a wall past which they can’t go. The result is an obvious distort which doesn’t bloat things. It’s a ‘dial-a-rasp’, or ‘dial-a-slam’ for percussive noises, and though the concept is two different kinds of overdrive combined, it’s an Airwindows plugin so it’s not overprocessed, it’s super raw.

That suits this plugin super well, and that’s why the AU-only High Impact has been a secret weapon for many people for years—and now it’s out for Mac and PC VST.

A word about the ‘secret weapon’ thing: I hate that. Do as I do, and communicate openly. Airwindows plugins are not preset things that you hide somewhere to add magic sauce to your mixes. They require intention, and there’s no one right way to use them: Airwindows plugins are like if a certain mic modeler you can rent that offers ‘silky expensive microphone models’ had just a blank ugly faceplate with just one knob, ‘silky’. And you could use it as a guitar stompbox if you wanted, not even a microphone anymore, and it was no longer connected to a ‘magic gear item’ so you’d have to ask, ‘HOW silky does this sound need to be, in my mix?’ because there was no one right answer.

That’s what Airwindows is like. For High Impact, read ‘raspy’ or ‘mean’ or ‘grindy’, whatever describes the sound for you. Now you’ve got an extra parameter: instead of just bass, treble, loud, soft (or even fat and thin) you’ve got ‘aggro’ on a knob. That can relate to any bit of audio you’re working with… and your ‘secret sauce’ is not the plugin, but your sense of taste (or tastelessness) in using and abusing it. So, don’t keep Airwindows plugins a secret weapon. I hate that. Tell people what you’re using, so I can get more supporters and keep doing all this, on a bigger and bigger scale.

Speaking of which, I have a Patreon milestone! As of a couple days ago, I hit $600 a month, and I’ve recently changed that to be the point where I start releasing the Kagi catalog! Now, people sometimes bail as the first of the month rolls around (and also I don’t get paid quite the full amount shown). So, it’s possible this milestone will go poof as we reach May, in which case we’re still waiting. BUT, if the dust settles and it’s still over $600 going into May, I will put out Iron Oxide 4 (the second most popular plugin I have EVER made) as free AU/VST!

(oh my God, I look so young in that video o_O )

If I’m still over $600 when May begins, you get THAT plugin free. My hope is that, as I reach this stage, people get more of an idea of what’s possible out of my Patreon project. All this time, I’ve been putting out more than 47 plugins entirely from the ‘freebie pile’, and not touching the ones that kept me in business a decade. Now, we start to get into the serious ones, the ones worth $50 to a lot of people. I’ve even drawn up a timeline on the Patreon, showing when each plugin will come out if I stay above $600. (if I clear $1000 they go twice as fast and I’ll revise the timeline accordingly!)

Here’s where things REALLY get interesting. Hang on to your DAWs, because we’re about to go full warp drive :)

Date April 9, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

SideDull

TL:DW; Like a highpass on the side channel, except it’s a lowpass.

SideDull

There are some nice things about Patreon-era Airwindows. Not the money: that sucks, though I think I just about have basic survival taken care of as long as I don’t eat much and nothing happens to my car :)

No, the cool thing is this: I can put out tools that have NOTHING to do with a plugin marketplace. If even one person finds the plugin useful, I can put it out. SideDull is kind of like that. I was asked, ‘since Sidepass is great, can we have a lowpass version?’. And I went ‘huhh? why would anyone want to narrow just top end, or center mids and up while not touching lows?’

The answer is of course ‘why not?’ and ‘if you are sure you won’t be doing that, don’t install this plugin’ :)

I don’t need to explain what SideDull does: it’s the same as Sidepass but in reverse, narrowing/mono-ing highs and down. I WOULD like to explain something about its role in a DAW user’s toolkit, though. I’m seeing this increasing churn in the plugin industry, a frenzy of new stuff and new requirements and DRM systems and dongles and such. It’s like a fulltime job to keep up with your recording system. My own pet fear is updating something only to find that I’ve hosed myself and everything’s now broken.

That’s why SideDull, and every other plugin, is built on a time-capsule 10.6.8 system and the VST’s built on a time-capsule isolated-from-the-internet virtual Windows 7. I’m using the simplest possible interfaces (some vendors, like Blue Cat, have taken pains to implement the generic interface super well, and can even skin it attractively) and not touching stuff that causes forced obsolescence, which I think is really bad news for us all.

So, the free AU/VST plugins (and the Kagi AUs before them) can be like your favorite screwdriver: you get to have the best and simplest audio tools that do NOT break. That also means that if you can only afford legacy computers (or just like being frugal and spending your money on Rickenbackers, as I long to do) you aren’t out in the cold… ever. I’m dedicating the rest of my life to putting tools in the hands of kids and dinosaurs alike, and following it up with my open source initiative. And the longer I do live, the more of it I get to do: but if I keel over tomorrow, all the plugs will still work and I will have had a good day and slept with a clear conscience :)

(and if I do croak, somebody mirror it all! pronto! it’s not all on GitHub yet!)

THERE ARE CHANGES to my Patreon. The tape emulations are closer! I’ve scaled all the goals down to make them more reachable. (remember, I’d like it to be through many people rather than just a few, the goal must remain reached for me to continue doing those rewards!) The new ‘start going through the list one a month’ point is now $600, opensourcing is $800, releasing two a month is $1000 etc. This is added to what I’m already doing, not replacing it: I’ll keep doing the plugins I am doing, you just start to get the ‘greatest hits’ too.

Also, if you missed it: when the release schedule stresses me out, sometimes I turn to game programming. I’ve just put out the mostly-final form of one such game thing, the Minecraft server plugin Snowball Madness. There’s a video and everything, and I have a server up and running this peculiarly anarchic Minecraft variant: it’s at snowball.mymc.io (minecraft 1.11), because sometimes you just need to go somewhere and blow things up with infinite TNT. This is something I keep around, so anyone who’d like to join me and my friends in our occasional building-parties is welcome to learn the ropes (or the snowballs) join, and find some nice secluded spot to homestead. I view it as a longterm anarchy server with a twist (or six), and of course if you’d like to support these researches… which I have to do, to keep from burning out on plugins alone… you can simply support my regular Patreon or direct minecraft-oriented Airwindows fans to do that. Nothing more is needed, this is just another thing I do and have always done :)

Date April 4, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Chris

Loud

Speed-King-Izing Axis Longboards

High Impact

SideDull

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club