Toybox is nothing more or less than a tiny manual FIR filter! If you’d like to tweak the individual poles of a mini impulse response, or average samples (note: a more recent freebie, Average, makes that easier) then Toybox is the toy for you. Because it’s a simple and tight little FIR implementation, you’ll get good tonal depth out of whatever you construct.
Toybox declares one sample of latency.
LeadVox is an ambitious combination of things that might be useful on a lead vocal, none of them particularly normal!
Overtones does a Chebyshev filter, enhancing harmonics on only the top end of the signal. Hypes up the overtones and brings them forward, like you’re belting harder.
Find Frequency and Find / Cancel are an ADT effect (not as slick as the current Airwindows ADT, but functional) on just the midrange of the signal. You can use it to shape the tonality of the voice, but it won’t be an obvious ADT (fixed flange) because it’s bandlimited. Bear in mind that extensive use of this will make the vocal more diffuse and less up-front. It’s meant as a subtle tone tweak.
Body Fullness puts a subtle overdrive onto the lows only. Not just a gain boost, doing this type of saturation (like in Density) brings the frequencies forward in space. If the chest and deepness of your voice is getting lost, add this until it comes forward, not so much that it’s exaggerated.
And Soften Brights is a Smooth stage only on the highs. It’ll tuck the edginess of esses and things in, without being too obvious about it. Treat it like it’s labeled, just add enough to make brightness texturally softer, don’t use it as an EQ for it really isn’t one.
This is meant as a ‘subtle touches’ channel strip on lead vocal tracks that are already pretty much there: don’t use it as a ‘broad EQ stroke’ tool, apart from Body Fullness and what Find Frequency does it doesn’t HAVE any EQ. That said, if you like the idea of exaggerating effects that aren’t simple EQ, knock yourself out :)
Overheads is another eccentric Airwindows plugin that’s almost impossible to comprehend without decent instructions.
SO, here we go!
Overheads tries to smooth out a track or set of tracks, so that bumpy drums are removed and only the cymbals remain. That’s what the ‘node’ is for (the controls are Node Compress and Node Position).
It’s designed to work with Node Position somewhere in the middle. If stuff like kick and toms are sticking out, it’s set wrong. Crank up Node Compress and explore, until you find a spot where the drums aren’t.
Once you’ve got that, turn Node Compress back down—then bring it back up, to the point where the drums start to go away, but haven’t had their tones horribly altered. You can probably bring up cymbals this way, leaving more sonic room for close mics.
Or, there’s another possibility. Tweak the Node Position until the way it’s affecting the drum sounds is good. I find that over to the left, the sound is more bloated and fat and works with four-on-the-floor thumping but not snares, whereas it kicks more over to the right. I like around 0.6 to 0.8 for an aggressive sound. There’s not a lot of gain on tap so the level going into the plugin has to be pretty high, and it’s going to really accentuate all the cymbals as that’s more or less the point of the plugin, so if you don’t really lay into the kick and snare it’ll be hopeless.
It’s a quirky plugin, make no mistake. It can sound horrible, but if you get the hang of how the kick/snare rolls and where their power sit in the middle of that node there, you can do neat things with it, and get a interestingly sculpted ‘old school’ tone out of the thing, which really shows exactly where the beat sits.
StereoEnsemble is much humbler than Ensemble, its mono namesake.
Where Ensemble produces a dense and unreal texture like old string ensembles, what StereoEnsemble produces is much simpler. It’s just a stereo-scattered bunch of reinforcements, that you can spread using the top control and mix dry/wet with the bottom control.
It’s actually a half-decent simple room reverb, with its smattering of bright ‘early reflections’.
Use as you will.
