Airwindows

YNotLowpass

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

YNotLowpass introduces a new way to internally distort filters, and a new control… Resonant Edge! The ‘normal’ position for this is around 0.1 on the control. If you make it less, you get a slightly asymmetrical distortion that lets you get really warm analog filter sounds, even when they’re resonant. If you crank it up, the Resonant Edge lets you go to very aggressive, glitchy sounds that are a lot more like circuit bending than bit-banging.

This is the alternate version of YLowpass, 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. These are also buying me some time to work on the upcoming ConsoleMC, which is beginning to take shape… and on a new update for ToTape, for which I’ve got an idea for a bias control. So, use YNotLowpass 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 :)

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

Date October 1, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

CrickBass

TL;DW: CrickBass is a flexible but aggressive bass tone for dual pickups.

CrickBass.zip(679k)

I consider this a utility plugin, and maybe it’ll find utility with you too. What’s a CrickBass?

Chris’s Rickenbacker Bass, set up with two DI inputs for neck pickup on the left and bridge pickup on the right.

Now you might ask, which Chris? Well, obviously, Chris from Airwindows, but this plugin really came into existence when I worked out some of the details about Chris Squire’s Rickenbacker tone… because this is also in the style of what he did.

The trick to Crick is, that bridge pickup is rattly and abrasive and would seem to be a great candidate for distortion and re-amping. And the neck pickup’s right up by the neck, thin and relatively low impedance, and would seem to be a good candidate for clean and accurate low-end.

And that’s not what Chris Squire did, and when you hear and play through CrickBass you understand why that’s not what he did. Squire liked to overdrive, not the bridge, but the neck pickup. That rattly clangy bridge was kept clean, even though it sounds amazing cranked through an amp.

CrickBass is a composite of the Airwindows plugins BigAmp and LilAmp, with BigAmp on the left to take the neck pickup and distort it, and LilAmp on the right to give the right amplike qualities to the bridge pickup. Both share the same set of drive and tone controls, but the controls cover different ranges on the different amps to produce a range of sounds that should all work and adapt to any stereo bass (as in, neck and bridge pickups on separate outputs). Use the controls on the bass to make subtler adjustments. Adjust the drive for how much gain you should have, remembering that the neck pickup is supposed to overdrive enough for a huge foundation of the sound, and that the bridge pickup is meant to be cleaner but not necessarily totally free of grit. Then adjust the tone so that clicks, string handling and so on, hit with the tone quality of whatever snare you’re making the bass merge with.

Both of these amp sims make a point of applying anti-aliasing filtering as part of the EQ filtering that helps mimic a cab, so they’re far from full-range but good at sounding analog. Even when set up to be bright as hell, that’s still ‘bass amp’ bright rather than ‘supertweeter’ bright. The idea is to match other elements in the track with your bass string percussive noises, so they jump right out and hit like a train.

And then if you’re NOT aiming for a really abrasive proggy tone… handle the string in such a way that it’s not making vicious SKRONK noises :) maybe dial back the tone but do it with your playing, and let the ‘amp’ continue to deliver midrange articulation to the mix. That’ll sit in the mix more effectively than something which sounds deep and bassy in solo.

If you’re looking to get REAL abrasive, the remaining ingredient is fret buzz, and this combined with a really low action and heavy pick attack will get you into the Chris Squire zone very nicely (which some people don’t like one bit… matter of taste and style, really).

You can also run a mono bass into it and it’ll still work, but the intention is for neck pickup on the left and bridge pickup on the right. It’ll sum the two sounds to mono in any event.

If this is the sort of thing you like, I might have given you a quick Crick in the neck (and the bridge!) and a real short-cut for bass DI tracking. Since this is a plugin, you can track right through it (zero latency) and then if you must do something else in the final mix, you still can. But it’s meant to deliver this sort of tone in the most direct, no-fuss way imaginable. I’m looking forward to using this on everything: the extreme rawness of BigAmp and LilAmp turned out to be ideal for this purpose. If it’s also useful to you, then yay! Bonus. Or of course misuse it, run breaks or synths or drums into it. Have fun!

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

Date September 24, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

ResEQ2

TL;DW: ResEQ2 is a single, sharp, sonorous mid peak.

ResEQ2.zip(512k)

This is another ‘piece of an upcoming great plugin’. In order to do an MCI console properly I had to do a good mid peak.

And we’re talking ‘way better than just a sharp biquad filter’ mid peak. I needed clarity and character beyond what regular digital EQ cookbooks could cook up.

ResEQ2 continues on the work I started in the original ResEQ, where I observed that Manley EQ impulses for sharp resonances seemed to be like a sine-like ring, except the onset did NOT seem to be at the same frequency: seemed to start faster, even double the frequency. I made a whole plugin, ResEQ, giving it my best shot for generating multiple resonant ‘rings’ and combining them, to produce a convolution impulse that was the sum of multiple analog-like resonances. It still exists: it’s way before I routinely worked at 96k, and it’s got a lot of quirks, but it does get a distinct sound.

I returned to those deep, murky waters when trying to come up with a sweepable mid peak like certain classic analog consoles.

ResEQ2 is the result. It’s the opposite of what you’ll normally find in great classic analog consoles. A lot of the classics really had quite limited analog EQ: detailed parametric sculpting came in with SSL, and to some extent API before that. In the olden days, things were a lot simpler (and you gained something sonically from this simplicity).

But there were a few special cases, and so you had MCI’s sweepable mid, that could only boost. Not cut. It just gave you a sort of ring, wherever you wanted it. Not the most flexible circuit… but a hitmaker.

This is because, contrary to modern practice, there’s huge power in being able to single out a midrange, upper-mid, or treble frequency, and sort of just open up the top of it so it can get effortlessly loud. Instead of just blasting everything, you find one presence peak on your track that really lets it speak, and you just give that a boost. More peak energy, more clarity exactly where it’s most useful, and it’s almost never in the same place for different instruments or vocalists, so the combined sound of the mix cuts through on dozens of sonorities at once, and everything is powerful and clear.

It’s the mids equivalent of Airwindows Weight for bass, and it works incredibly well (even if you do it with biquads or EQ-design cookbooks). And I don’t have the analog-Console projects finished yet… but you can have this part of it now.

Use the ‘ow argh way too extreme’ settings like 1.0, where everything kind of turns into an audio laser, to dial in exactly what spot opens up an instrument or voice for maximum passion and sonority. Then, dial it back to around 0.5 and begin increasing it, seeing at what point you’ve got too much of a good thing. ResEQ2 is great at being a subtle light-bringer and giving clarity to a track. It’s also a full-on energy weapon that can be set to ‘way too much’, so use it however you please. The resonance increases as you turn it up, so feel free to dial it back if it gets ringy. Probably not a good plugin for mixing live sound unless you like dial-a-feedback :) hope you enjoy ResEQ2!

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

Date September 17, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

SubTight

TL;DW: SubTight uses a variation on the Creature algorithm to tighten sub-lows.

SubTight.zip(500k)

So here’s another interesting little tool that’s not been seen before.

Creature has a special mode where you can set the dry/wet to ‘inverse’, cancelling out what the algorithm produces. It’s a soft slew clipper, not a normal algorithm or a simple filter, so what it cancels isn’t easily controllable. However, for the most part it darkens and distorts the sound, and then when you stack up multiple poles of it, it becomes uncontrollable, particularly as frequency drops.

So, in theory, you could use it as an increasingly steep lowpass… and subtract it from dry, to make something that acts like a highpass.

What happens when you use a distorted lowpass to take out bass? It’s not able to soak up all the lows, as if it was a simple filter. What happens when multiple stages of it cause the deepest bass to go unstable and wild? That part cancels first, or ends up overcanceling and making a sort of ‘node’ in the midbass that’s totally cancelled, while distorted sub-bass gets through inverted.

All right. That said, what if you just keep the number of stages in check, and only bring in enough of it to cancel out the super lows, or simply cut them back a little? That would be a sub-bass conditioner with the following qualities: it’ll give you an increasingly steep cutoff, it’ll emphasize dynamics and impact, and it will resist totally removing bass content in favor of reshaping it, tightening it, highlighting impact and punch.

That’s why this plugin is called SubTight. It’s not exactly a filter, much less a sharp and accurate filter. It’s optimized so that you can hear where bass really starts to cancel out, and the idea is you can go up to that point, and then pull back. To do a clean steep low cut, use something else. This is a subs conditioner, that’ll give a different foundation on things.

The original release of SubTight is available at SubTightOriginal.zip(497k)

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

Date September 9, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Chris

YNotLowpass

CrickBass

ResEQ2

SubTight

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club