Airwindows

Iron Oxide 4

IronOxide4Demo is a tape emulation AU universal binary plugin. It’s old school tape emulation. Unlike ToTape, Iron Oxide 4 doesn’t present a realistic tape model with wide-range sound—instead, it traps in the sound in the lows and highs and lets you make it bark. This is the one for putting on isolated tracks and cranking out, hitting hard.

Also, you can blur out the tone with flutter which will help get away from the ‘digital’ sound too—and Iron Oxide 4 features a new control, Inv/Dry/Wet. How this works is, you can narrow down the tone to a focussed area that is saturated, and then mix this with dry signal as you might in Reaper. But it doesn’t stop there: you can also add the Iron Oxide tone inverted, subtracting it!

What you get when you cancel out a saturated bandlimited tone is this: you’re producing a mid cut, but the mid cut stops happening when the Iron Oxide section saturates. As a result, your tone cut lets through only the punch and impact, and pulls back the mud. This makes Iron Oxide 4 a really flexible, easily approachable tone shaper. If you’re trying to heighten sound density it’s a great way to intensify a frequency range, and if you want to amp up the impact it can do that with the Inverted range on inv/dry/wet. You can also dial in the area you don’t want on full-wet, then subtract it.

Simulates tape speeds of 1.75 ips to 150 ips (!) and you can give a separate tape speed for lows and highs. This is really designed to act as a bandpass in a way more realistic tape sims can never do, it serves an entirely different role in a mix. I’ve never recommended use of Iron Oxide on the 2-buss or a final mix for it’s too colored and vivid- use ToTape for that.

Iron Oxide is $50.

Date August 14, 2013
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

Podcast

PodcastDemo is a pair of AU universal binary plugins for radio-type broadcast processing, simplified to the point of being drop-in one-stop fixes for your podcasting or video production needs. You pick between Podcast and Podcast Deluxe, throw it on your voiceover track (recorded with good headroom) and enjoy managed voice levels without a lot of zooming background noise.

It works by tying its release speed to waveform voltage level. Given silence, Podcast will just sit there with its level locked off. It only adjusts when there’s something to adjust with. This also helps it hang on to a smoother voice tonality, as it’s not manipulating levels during delicate sounds or zero crossings. Podcast has no latency, so you can try it out on live performances, and it doesn’t use excessive ‘radio broadcast’ techniques like phase rotation, so you can try it on music mixes and lead vocal tracks: at high gains it should produce a really aggressively compressed sound.

Podcast Deluxe is the same thing, except with built-in phase rotation for more of an FM radio announcer type sound. It’ll apply a particular sort of gloss that might better suit some content such as voice-overs, and may lend itself to processing background harmony vocals. A certain amount of immediacy is lost from the phase rotation (done in several stages at a carefully calculated ratio for optimum gloss) but a whole other texture is gained, and you get it free as part of the package.
Whether it’s graceful level balancing with the ‘extra boost’ totally off, strong clear signal with the default setting of 0.1, or serious aggressive loudness at higher settings, Podcast (and Podcast Deluxe) could be your go-to voice processor!

Podcast is $50.

Date April 18, 2013
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Logical2

Logical2Demo was an intermediate stage of Logical, transitioning between the original Logical with its convolution-based SSL color and Logical3 with its full set of controls made to work like familiar buss comps.

Logical2 had none of that, though it sounded good. It had only two controls, an input and output gain. It was about trying to make the plugin simpler and easier to approach, but I ended up doing that by more closely modeling the behavior of existing compressors.

If this version is the version of Logical you want, what you do is buy the current version and then email me asking for a copy of the older version. I’ll send it to you, as if you’d bought it back in 2013 when it came out.

Date March 28, 2013
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

CStrip

CStripDemo is the Airwindows channel strip! 32bit/64bit/PPC Audio Unit, with EQ, compression, gate, highpass, lowpass and timing trim, CStrip is the go-to toolbox for any track.

All the parts not in use switch themselves out of the circuit, so you can engage only the parts you need. They’re designed to work together perfectly, interleaved in the most useful possible way. This is also one of the first plugins to get Airwindows floating point noise shaping, retaining more tonal depth on the Audio Unit buss. The signal flow goes like this:

Gate—Highpass—Compressor—EQ(High/Mid/Low)—Timing—Lowpass

Gate’s an implementation of Digital Black. The Highpass can help tighten up the action of the compressor, which is the specialty comp that first came out as ButterComp: it’s a very soft and gentle compressor. EQ was originally its own plugin, and a fantastic grab-and-go broad-stroke tone shaper. Timing is there just in case you need to delay a track a tiny bit against another track, by ear: it’s easier than sliding tracks by a sample or two in the arrange window. And the Lowpass is a special algorithm, great at shaping things like guitars. It goes after the gate and compressor just so it can further soften any artifacts the dynamics might have produced.

The whole thing is designed to be run off a MIDI controller such as the NanoKontrol: you can fit everything onto that, plus a fader, pan and an aux for a reverb send. Set it up assigned to the selected track, and you can go through adjusting or automating stuff by ear, without even having the plugin interface open. There’s nothing so useful as adjusting sound, by ear, without being drawn into thought about the numbers. CStrip is designed to give you a huge amount of control over the basics, like that, in a great sounding way.

CStrip is $50.

Date January 27, 2013
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

Chris

Iron Oxide 4

Podcast

Logical2

CStrip

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club