Airwindows

BiquadStack

TL;DW: BiquadStack is a way of making a parametric EQ out of stacked biquad filters.

BiquadStack in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Biquads’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
BiquadStack.zip(519k) standalone(AU, VST2)

There’s already a plugin called BiquadTriple, and it’s three biquads simply cascaded to do what they do with steeper roll-offs before resonance. I’d said ‘this is to let you mock up effects where you’re going to be using filters’ and mentioned ‘ways to make the Q factors more specific and staggered’ but didn’t really go there, at the time.

That time arrived in a hurry when I started really trying to work out what was so special about SSL channel strips, so I could use similar parametric bands in ConsoleX.

So, BiquadStack is out to let you use this right away, without waiting, and see how that goes. The way it works is, it has the same technique used to make very steep Butterworth filters. This is using specific Q factors in combination, so they end up doing a very accurate highpass or lowpass without resonance or irregularities. Typically, when you find this stuff it’s carefully designed to behave correctly, and you can make steep Butterworth filters of whatever order you like, this way.

Using it for bandpasses instead, and adding nonlinearity, gives you a really interesting response: it’s not a narrowing spike as a normal resonant filter would be, instead it’s a little region of intensity that you can bring in or remove. The nonlinearity increases as you add more boost, or stays subtle at lower settings. The edges of the region develop little ‘moats’ to accentuate the effect: some sort of phase interference.

The result is what I wanted: tight and effective parametric EQ which is not ‘analog modeled’, it’s designed to do what I’d WANT to do with analog modeling. It’s about letting through the energy and sonority (or suppressing energy you don’t want) rather than trying to duplicate tone colors of some hardware and muddying things up. This one is full-range, and smoothed, because there’s only one of it: if you want to do sweepy automation things keep it around. There will be more, like a three-band that can fit in Airwindows Consolidated, and the full SSL-style four-band that goes in ConsoleX.

If you want to get a head start on what that will bring you, play with BiquadStack. If you want four bands of it on every channel in your whole mix… well so do I, and I’m working on it :)

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 June 2, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

CrunchCoat

TL;DW: CrunchCoat is a cursed retro digital reverb!

CrunchCoat in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
CrunchCoat.zip(561k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Such was the reaction of my livestream as this one came to life. Cursed retro digital is such an evocative term, isn’t it? Gives you an idea of what you’re in store for.

This is no simple bitcrusher. What it’s doing, is taking the existing ClearCoat reverb, a bright-ambiences reverb, into unknown territory through relentless abuse of undersampling. This is a first for me: rather than use undersampling to cleanly deliver appropriate reverb sounds whether at 2x or 4x sample rates, this time we’re just running with that functionality and allowing you to crunch the sample rate down to about 40 hertz, if you like.

What happens to the waveform when you only get a ‘sample’ every now and then? In this case, the plugin interpolates so it’s not all square-wavey. Good news and/or bad news: it’s not doing a clever interpolation. It’s basically drawing straight lines between the points. So, depending on what the reverb’s doing, you can get fairly soft waves… or pointy spikey nastiness. This, combined with the primitive input not-filtering, means you get a LOT of color and texture, but not the texture it was when it started. Instead… well, ‘cursed retro digital’ sums it up. Also, you can wildly pitch-swoop the entire reverb and crank up the regeneration to infinite sustain (or cut it out completely, even more than ClearCoat), which I’m sure nobody is going to use for evil at all.

This will lead to great new things for all my reverbs going forward. But this specific reverb is for only certain people, and you know who you are. Have fun!

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 May 26, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

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.

Date May 19, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Discontinuity

TL;DW: Discontinuity models air under intense loudness.

Discontinuity in Airwindows Consolidated(CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Discontinuity.zip(498k) standalone(AU, VST2)

This might be the most important subtle sound effect I’ve ever done.

Air isn’t linear. That’s why DAWs don’t sound like reality: they are literally too perfect, in that their transients, their sound combining, every aspect of their operation has no error at all. One would assume this would produce perfect sound, but some of us have never shut up about our grievances with it. (we just lost a titan of that grievance in Steve Albini, but he’s far from alone in that.)

If you have sounds in air, they sound real even while the air itself distorts them. Much like my recent work with capacitors modulating their values under voltage pressure (up to 80% in some cases!), air modulates the speed of sound under AIR pressure. This makes incredibly obvious and intense crackles on loud sounds like rocket takeoffs, but many of us have heard this crackle at things like rock concerts, especially in a really live room like a hockey rink.

Discontinuity simply adds THAT distortion. At loudnesses from 70 dB to 140 dB. That’s all it does, and at loudnesses below 110 dB or so it’s quite subtle… but I’ve found use for it as quiet as 71dB (the voice tracks on my last two videos!)

I won’t say it’s correct and accurate at 140dB: I include that because people will enjoy it so much, but I’m not using that much. I just have to… because people will enjoy it, and because it’s impossible not to hear when cranked that high.

How to use Discontinuity? At any point in the mix where there’s a sound, apply it so that the loudest possible sound (typically 0dB, or clipping) matches the loudness you need. If your sound peaks at 10 dB quieter than clipping, and the sound needs to seem like it’s 102 dB, set Discontinuity to 112 dB. And listen! There will be an obvious sweet spot where it starts to seem exactly right, and you can dial in the apparent loudness as if it was a tone or EQ move.

Discontinuity does its frequency modulation using sample buffers. For that reason, it permanently has a bit of latency and it’s never quite the same latency because it’s frequency modulated by the track it’s on. For that reason, you could put it on every track and drum mic as long as you give up the idea of phase coherence. It’s better on minimally miked things or possibly submixes, and on distinct sounds that don’t need to keep perfect phase alignment with each other.

Depending on who you are and what you’ve dreamed of being able to make sound do, you might immediately not care about any of that, and immediately start using it on everything and never stop. That’s me. It’s like when I invented Console, only more so. The interesting thing is how useful I find the quiet, subtle settings when getting a mix to gel and come alive like it’s a real sonic event happening. I can set very delicate and quiet, against super loud, and have them all just work.

Discontinuity is a fundamental part of ConsoleX, which I’m still working on. I hope you like getting a little piece of the mixing revolution early, so you can learn about it :)

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 May 12, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

Chris

BiquadStack

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Discontinuity

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