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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.

YNotNotch

TL;DW: YNotNotch is soft and smooth to nasty, edgy texture-varying filtering, no control smoothing.

YNotNotch.zip(517k)

YNotNotch is the final incarnation of the Y series plugins, done to give me more experience with smoothing plugin controls. It’s got a biquad filter with more than a little extra: the Y filters all have a ResEdge control. This defaults to 0.1 (like the gain control) but it can be lowered to 0 for a softer, somewhat more organic tone… or, turned up and up and up until the filter begins to distort and act weird in very unusual ways.

This is NOT like a sampler model. It’s a whole other algorithm, putting weird edges on the way the filter resonates when the Resonance is turned up. You can basically dial in the sharpness of the edge, like with the other Y filters. But unlike the other Y filters, the Resonance control goes a little further. Not in sharpness, but in dullness… you can drop resonance down to where it’s basically an ultra-shallow slope cut, put the frequency to either extreme, and use the very first hints of the Resonance control to dial in an extreme low or high cut.

And then either soften or sharpen the hell out of the edge, to get tones that don’t really exist anywhere else. This is the alternate version of YNotch, except without control smoothing. That means it’ll be slightly less CPU-hungry, and might be preferable for situations like use in VCV Rack at very small buffer sizes. So, use YNotNotch if you’d like slightly more CPU efficiency, if you run tiny buffers, if you are using it as a fixed filter sound, or if you want that ‘neuro’ glitchy zipper-noise sound, at which it’ll be really good since it already has an aggressively unnatural filter tone :)

Have a good Thanksgiving/Black Friday/Cyber Whatever, folks. I’m going to work on updating ConsoleMC and SubTight the way I demonstrated in ClearCoat, and that’ll be next week, and I’ll have something really cool out there by Xmas. For now there’s no point making any noise while everyone else is going ham promotionally :)

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.
VCV Rack module

Post-Scarcity Minecraft

Hi! With a bit of luck and hopefully not too much fuss, you can do this too. Here is the server mod: I’m using it on a 1.12 version of Spigot.

SnowballMadness.jar_.zip(61k)

That’s if the thing you want to do is to run the mod on your own server. The source code is also on my github :)

This project has existed for some time now, I’ve just gained more insight into what it actually is. It’s got some things in common with anarchy servers, but I didn’t really design it for that (on the whole, my brother Dan coded it in Java, and I took that and added lots more Java to the existing structure that’s more in line with game design and gameplay choices)

I’ve been thinking about the old days when I used to stream Minecraft stuff more on my channel (or other channels). It was a simpler time before a lot of bad things happened, but I don’t think it was all nostalgia. We were playing a game that was expanding, but were getting things like new block colors, moderate expansions of what we had: in many ways it still resembled the olden times when there wasn’t much TO Minecraft. It was what you made it.

The Snowball stuff I designed, was all about bridging the gap between Survival and Creative. You could make certain things very easy. You could make blocks without issue, create vast structures, install floors or fly about or zap enemies as if by magic… if you spotted them in time. The thing these mods removed was scarcity. There’d be a method to take anything you had, and make vast amounts of it. If you could get a thing, you could grind up any amount of it, like a duplication glitch that was turned into a game mechanic.

And then it was adjusted so, if you weren’t careful with your tools, they could turn and bite you, doing ridiculous things. For some time, the ‘multiplier snowball’ exemplified Snowball Madness: two stacks of snowballs with a stack of TNT right up top, and you could obliterate everything including yourself in a single misclick, or prank-click. That one feature is nerfed: you can bounce your shots by stacking snowballs this way, but no more of the exponential multiplications of doom. While funny, they were a funny-once, too unreasonable to leave around for regular gameplay.

The thing is, if you learn Snowball, you’re thinking of multiple ways to deal with both your basic tasks, and ways to deal with the gotchas that Snowball can sometimes spring on you, and the common factor is post-scarcity. It’s not creative mode, but you can generate resources probably quicker than in creative, certainly if you count building structures or clearing spaces. At the same time, it’s not giving you jobs to do beyond what you might think up to accomplish particular tasks. Building a fort? Are you making stacks of blocks (do you have your one starter block to work from?) or are you basing it off a structure like a big sphere or cylinder? If you build something wrong, can you use the tools you have to delete the thing you made, or do you go too far and make a big hole? If you do that, do you turn it into a base or move elsewhere and try again? If you want a big hole, do you want an exploded, blown-up one, or neat walls down to a cave floor, or to bedrock?

That’s not a hypothetical question as I’m going to try and make this server accessible. Go to my Patreon and I’ll put the server IP there (I’m unsure if it will work right away for outside users, but I’ve got it on a permanently-on laptop in my basement, and my fiber should have little trouble handling a small Minecraft server, even with several people playing). I’ll leave it up, probably restart it now and then when nobody’s on there, and we’ll see what happens. This used to be my socializing before my life was just plugins, and it’s probably a good way to do Q&As on youtube streams and just talk about stuff.

ClearCoat

TL;DW: ClearCoat is an array of bright ambience reverbs.

ClearCoat.zip(571k)

So, after months of work on refining Householder reverb matrices and realism and depth, and getting started on the huge tasks of mastering the tones of Bricasti reverbs and million-dollar analog recording consoles… I make a dual-mono bright ambience.

What’s that for? First of all, it’s for me. I’m using it immediately on album mixes. But beyond that, it’s an example of something very Airwindows-like: once I get access to something, I share it. I wasn’t able to do sounds like these when I did the kPlate reverbs. I tried. My tools for making the Householder matrix stuff hadn’t evolved enough yet: this is why kChamberAR sounds the way it does. I had bright ambiences, but they were very artificial (though, nifty in their own right)

And this is what I’m sharing now: I got it to work. Next stage unlocked, with not one but effectively seventeen bright ambiences in one. ClearCoat is the one-stop shop for sparkle and atmosphere. It’s not about lingering verb tails: the space it produces is dual-mono and remains tied to the sound that’s creating it, and while there is feedback in the algorithm, it’s calculated to be exactly halfway between the purity of infinite sustain, and the purity of BitShiftGain in the feedback path cutting the feedback by 6.08 dB. The idea there is to produce a consistent tone in the feedback path while allowing it to bloom a little. Basically more Chris from Airwindows experimentation: see if you like the results in the sense of space the plugin creates.

On top of that, I’m exploring a refinement of SubTight, the same plugin that backfired on me in ConsoleMC. I think if I scale it to sample rate a certain way, that might tame it, and the kind of energy it brought is perfect for this plugin. The brightening and subs-cutting is happening after the reverb matrix, to enliven the space.

It’s simple to use: top slider picks a setting, bottom slider is your dry/wet. Add just a bit for in-line air on an instrument or submix, go all-wet for use on an aux. I’m using it as my Verb 1, with the upcoming kCathedral for Verb 2.

Why go for specifically this effect? The theory here is simple: you get better mixes when you’re serving a purpose rather than throwing tone colors around just to make them happen. ClearCoat is there to be an extremely refined and intense form of ‘nearfield reflections’, like singing in a bathroom, or drumming in a live drum room. Yes, you can turn it way up and it’ll sound like a really bright reverb, like a small (to medium) room with tile or stone walls. But what you can also do is turn it right down once you have the tone color you want… and then HINT at that tone color, with it.

And if you do that, ClearCoat ought to give you the gloss you’re looking for, while minimally affecting the rest of the mix. No clutter, no excess energy, no trace of a tone character beyond what you need, and a cleaner mix as a result.

Let me know if ClearCoat works for you, and especially whether it’s acting OK at diverse sample rates with the changes I made in SubTight. If so, I can and will update the actual SubTight plugin AND ConsoleMC to correspond (if you’re working at 1x sample rates there will be no change for you, but if you’re working 2x or 4x or oversampling 2x or 4x, you might not have to compensate for the brightness as much to get your sound)

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.
VCV Rack module

ConsoleMC

TL;DW: ConsoleMC, and/or ConsoleMD, goes for the tone shaping of the classic MCI console!

ConsoleMC.zip(1M)

or for a flatter version without the SubTight algorithms (more simplified and DAWlike)

ConsoleMD.zip(1M)

This has been a real journey, to get to this point.

ConsoleMD is replacing my fully analog mixing system, which I’m now looking to sell off. Technically, just the mixer, as I can re-use the Lavry for tracking, where I used to have it dedicated to re-capturing the mixdown from the Heritage Audio mixer. This is what it took, to retire that glorious beast.

It’s a channel strip that functions like a normal Console Channel, except it’s got treble, a sweepable mid that only boosts (like the classic MCI mid boost), bass, a fader that runs before the EQ section like the classic MCI, and a special pan switching network that’s like an evil cousin of LCR panning. And it’s a summing buss that brings the summing character of the big MCI desks with a gnarly analog dirtiness that’s not simply ‘add a distortion box’ but is actually a modification of other recent and unique work I’ve put out.

ConsoleMD draws on the following recent plugins: Creature. NOT SubTight. Sinew. ResEQ2. Pear. BitShiftPan. There is not a single normal DSP algorithm in this thing unless you count sin() and asin() functions. It is ALL built out of current, 2023 Airwindows plugins that have all been pretty well received, sometimes with a fair bit of excitement. I told you all this was working up to something. This is it.

Specifically, this is the first ‘it’ to come together: I’ve got at least five other big console concepts that deserve this treatment, but ConsoleMD is right here for you to jump into, right now. There’s a couple reverbs in the demo, including kCathedral which is a call-out to the corresponding Bricasti patch. Those are for later.

ConsoleMD is designed around running at 96k (or possibly 192k if you’re so inclined) but ought to work at 44.1k. If you’re at low sample rate and seek to oversample it 2x or 4x it shouldn’t do it any harm but try running it at 1x to see if you get more immediacy, as it learns from Console Zero and can put across a very clean signal path.

All of the EQ options are designed to be pristine when flat (mids, being boost only, are flat at 0.0 boost, not 0.5) and bring in multiple stages as you crank them harder and harder, whether it’s the highs and mids getting increasingly saturated or the mids getting increasingly high-Q, allowing for everything from clarity to tonal extremeness thoroughly beyond what any real MCI console would do. This is not a clone, it’s a tone in its own right, that tries to do the same job as some of the greatest big analog consoles ever to exist, but does it by the unforgiving and touchy rules of digital.

I hope it brings you joy, and helps you get your sound as it helps me get mine.

(here is the original super-bright release of ConsoleMC, as it came out that first day, in case it’s any use to you)
ConsoleMCoriginal.zip(1M)

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.
VCV Rack module

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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.