Airwindows

ResEQ

ResEQDemo is a universal binary AU plugin that gives you up to eight parallel resonant filters. It uses convolution modeling of an idealised analog-style peak impulse for extremely rich textures, and can do ‘parked wah’ effects of great sophistication.

The thing is, ResEQ builds a really complicated sort of ‘parked wah’ across a lot of frequencies, and doing that creates resonant (hence the name) tones that contain only those frequencies actively useful to you. It’s like going bonkers with a normal EQ or three and ripping everything that’s not useful. The result will sound very different from what you sent into the plug. You can use it on whatever, though it was designed around heavy guitar, particularly doubled or tripled heavy guitar where you might want additional thickness without screwing up other mix elements.

Note that effectively ResEQ gets rid of anything that will mask other instruments or get in the way in the mix—by centering on a whole bunch of different frequencies and discarding everything else, you can totally whack distortion-fizz no matter what the original tone sounds like. I’d suggest saving good settings as Logic presets, because it might take some time dialing them in, but with eight frequencies available you can have ‘secret guitar voicings’ as tricky to work out as a secret sauce. Try to find spaces in the frequency range to fill out the sound—some midrange, some up in the treble or supertreble, some down lower. The result will resemble a fullrange sound, but it will not mask other mix elements hardly at all.

ResEQ declares one sample of latency.

ResEQ is $50.

Date August 1, 2007
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Scalpel

Scalpel is an early attempt at a ‘surgical’ EQ meant to sound better than using a DAW’s internal DSP-cookbook EQ. It sort of almost works.

What it does is, give you three very narrow and intense beams of resonant filter, coded the same way ResEQ is coded. Instead of building a sound entirely out of these beams of resonance, Scalpel just gives you the mix and the three added filters. They have limited range and are happier in the mids and highs (but not the super-highs), and they’re not awesome at cutting, just at boosting.

They don’t sweep well by automation, either, because they recalculate their convolution kernel one bit at a time to avoid smashing 2007 CPUs too hard at once.

Lastly, I don’t see it as a mastering EQ, because it simply processes too much and does nothing to accomodate that necessity (newer plugins with a lot of processing, such as ToVinyl, take measures to retain tone and not just drown in a million calculations).

Have fun playing with Scalpel, and don’t cut yourself too bad ;) Scalpel declares one sample of latency.

Date July 21, 2007
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Space Odyssey

SpaceOdyssey means I’m really dating myself! ;)

This is the plugin that lets you go back in time and present music to people on Myspace. The popup menu gives you four options:

Source/Dry is what you’re supposed to have, normal digital audio.

Source/Wet is how you’d export your stuff to make into an mp3 for mySpace. It’s filtered to cope with what Myspace did to it, plus there’s a sort of ‘air boost’ you could sadly resort to.

Chopped/Dry is what Myspace would give you. They literally encoded every other sample, to save data. These days we get cranky if youtube isn’t streaming 1080p smoothly!

Chopped/Wet is what you’d do mix adjustments and stuff through. It let you hear the vague benefit of the filtering the way you’d hear it over Myspace, and you could adjust stuff to try to compensate for the loss of everything over 11K.

Enough, it’s too horrible. Doff your hat for those of us who lived through those literally dark (and grungy) times, and use DeRez if you want to sample rate chop (or indeed, buy BitGlitter). SpaceOdyssey is too depressing to contemplate. Once, music was seen to be THAT.

SpaceOdyssey declares seven samples of latency.

Date June 25, 2007
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Crystal

Crystal was the colorless version of the Character plugs, Airwindows ‘Virtual Console Collection’ years before anyone else was doing it. The idea was, make a ‘colorless’ version with all the same functionality, so people could try it out.

The Character plugins grew into BussColors, which let you switch between them and is still around and popular. Back in the day, though, you picked between plugins like ‘Luxor’, ‘Neverland’ and ‘APIcolypse’. The plugins dynamically generated convolution impulses based on the signal coming in, which is true even of the ‘colorless’ Crystal: its convolution impulse is simply a filter for the highest supersonic frequencies, with no added color or character.

The Character plugins (and Crystal) also had a saturation effect briefly seen in Channel, where the output was flat up until you hit a certain point and then switched to a gradual saturation curve. You can shift between very gradual saturation or hard clipping or anything in between. Thing is, I learned that way that people don’t like discontinuities in the transfer function: this feature didn’t sound as good to people as a single smooth curve.

But you can experiment with it for free with Crystal. Crystal’s also got an interesting trick on its output stage: it’s applying a ditherlike noise, but rather than applying it as a value it’s applying a blend between the output sample and the previous output sample. This makes high frequency content soften and fuzz, without adding noise to low frequency stuff or to silence. It’s there in Crystal, subtly, so if that sounds interesting give it a try.

Date June 25, 2007
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Chris

ResEQ

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Crystal

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