Airwindows

Smooth

Smooth is a typically Airwindows invention: a plugin that strictly alters texture, without affecting frequency or amplitude. At least, that’s the intention, and the result’s pretty convincing.

Used on a distorted guitar, it really brings a softer texture up to the point where it breaks up.

Used on something like an over-zingy acoustic guitar, it’s really quite amazing. You can dial in the ‘well-behaved’ and make the guitar sit back and be soothing—even if it’s something alarming like a direct piezo input. It goes totally natural, obediently, without losing desirable sparkle.

Used on a drum kit it’s even more startling. You get a beefy upfront kick, but snares drop right back and become vibey and ambient. Pushed too hard, drums squish. Set just right, Smooth auto-balances drums, presenting a mellow and sophisticated picture. Not for every mix, but a very slick option. The sweet spot is very narrow, but amazing.

Used on a bass, if it’s a noisy buzzing rowdy bass you can push it right to the point of distortion and it does neat things with the attack, defining it nicely. In general with a bass you can tune it so that you’re right between the rawer, plain sound and the fuzzy, overloaded sound, to get an amazing articulate tone that really stands out.

Date November 3, 2008
Author Chris
Comments 6 Comments

DeRez

DeRez is straight-up Airwindows bitcrushing and sample rate chopping!

It differs from, say, BitGlitter in that it’s not making any attempt to simulate an ‘analog low-bit hardware unit’. No, what DeRez does is hash up the sound with sheer, nasty digital bitcrush ITB. There’s just a touch of edge-softening to the frequency de-rez.

But what makes it an Airwindows product (well, freebie) is this: it’s like an analog bitcrush. Both the frequency and the bit depth sliders are continuous, NOT stepped. Yes, it can do fractional bit depths, yes that’s not actually possible as a format (you’d have to define one of the smaller bits as a smaller size than the others).

Plus, the controls are fluid (smoothed). If you make moves with them, the result won’t sound ‘stepped’ and because they’re continuous, that fluidity will be noticeable.

Hope you like this odd creation! It’s really in a sort of gray area between analog and digital, but it sounds very digital: just not in an ITB sort of way. Hard to explain. It’s free, just play with it, it doesn’t sound like traditional bitcrushers.

Date October 4, 2008
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Sable

Sable is like a really early, failed CStrip. It’s got a lowpass and highpass like CStrip, and two peaks. The thing is, these peaks are very narrow and only work in the midrange, and the lowpass and highpass don’t sound as good as CStrip’s.

So, Sable isn’t really a very good general purpose EQ, much less a mastering or mixbuss EQ. It uses the same resonance techniques as ResEQ (a custom convolved wave based on analog filters, not digital filters), so it does have some qualities to recommend it.

Use Sable if you’d like to use the peaks to liven up something in the midrange with a big colorful narrow boost, while also radically highpassing or lowpassing the tone. But bear in mind, Sable kinda overprocesses, so its tone is not going to be as rich as the better Airwindows designs.

Date October 3, 2008
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

SynKick

SynKick is actually two plugins, SynKick and SkinKick. Here’s how they work.

They’re synthetic kickdrums, either tuned to a set of related intervals (SynKick) or tuned to the harmonics of a drum head (SkinKick). Put them on a kick track or anything that can trigger them, and they will fire the sine-based bassbombs when triggered. Not only that, each sine component is triggered based on its phase, so every trigger will be different tonally.

That’s the good news, now here’s why they’re freebies.

The sines are lovely and all, and the idea of distinctive sounds for each trigger is cool… but doing it that way rather than just triggering a sample is too inconsistent. The kicks aren’t quite steady enough, definitely not punchy enough. You can use them to reinforce what’s already on a kick track, and each plugin has a dry slider for that purpose. You can use them as an Airwindows programmable bassbomb. But please, don’t try to use them as the primary kick in a track, because unfortunately they are just not powerful enough. They are basically different variations on bassbombs.

Date May 28, 2008
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

Chris

Smooth

DeRez

Sable

SynKick

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club