Airwindows

Lowpass

Lowpass is another strange early Airwindows creation!

The top slider is just a frequency control for a one-pole interleaved lowpass, the range covering the full range of sound from silence to Nyquist.

The bottom slider’s the one that gets weird. It adjusts between soft and hard, with the middle position being ‘normal lowpass’.

Soft means, louder sounds will push the lowpass frequency lower. That makes transient attacks sort of get covered up. The body of the sound gives one tone, but then all the dynamics go more muted.

Hard is the opposite: the body of the sound has one texture, but impacts go a little brighter. It’s more punchy, against a muted background, with transients sticking out a bit more.

I’m not sure how often people need a simple one-pole IIR lowpass. That’s an awfully basic sort of filter, and it’s not like it’s steep or anything. Its highpass counterpart is perhaps more obviously useful. But if you do use this sort of lowpass, now you’ve got one that has texture control :)

Date February 22, 2007
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

ChannelEQ

ChannelEQ is an early four-band fixed-frequency EQ. It uses pretty normal EQ code—okay, I lied, it’s not really very normal at all.

The basic EQ code isn’t that unusual, but it’s two separate EQs interleaved (a common Airwindows trick). The bands are built up in such a way that if it’s zeroed out, it’s passing unaltered data. Then, the bands are doctored so that boosts are also offsetting that band a tiny bit ahead in time, in an attempt to make it stand out or recede back. Finally the bands are recombined, the output value produced by the interplay between the two interleaved EQs.

Because even in 2007, Airwindows code was downright weird!

ChannelEQ’s designed to work at 44.1K, like the early convolution-based plugins, and it is free. It runs three samples of latency.

Date February 22, 2007
Author Chris
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Gate

Gate is a simple little utility plugin from early Airwindows. It’s the first Airwindows gate to use a technique from Density, where the gate transitions to silence through a ‘negative saturation’ stage. This causes sounds hit by the gate to sound like they’re pulling back spatially as well as going silent, something that is still unique to Airwindows to this day.

Date February 21, 2007
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

Glitch Shifter

GlitchShifter is an experiment that went horribly right.

The idea behind this one was to produce a pitch shifter which would scan for crossover points, so that it could just splice bits of audio without crossfading or anything of the sort.

Unfortunately or fortunately, the attempt created a monster.

Glitch Shifter can be ‘controlled’ by the top two sliders, the first one for altering sound diatonically and the second, free-form. Those set the pitch (up only: didn’t work out the opposite, but pitch lowering is easier with normal tools).

Then, there’s Tightness, Feedback and Dry/Wet. Tightness is the one that needs explaining, though Feedback and Dry/Wet are important for making craziness. Tightness works like this: crank it out, and Glitch Shifter is FORCED to track exactly with the input signal. That’ll cause it to glitch out horribly, because it’s got no freedom to wander searching for an edit point.

As you lower Tightness, Glitch Shifter casts a wider net in its search for splices. The splices get smoother and smoother… but the little chunks of audio get bigger and more out of sync. You’ll begin getting stutter effects, unpredictable jumps which can break up words and coherence on the input. Low Tightness on Glitch Shifter means a fluid but nonsensical output, possibly with wild robotic stammering, but all in lovely clear pitch-shifted audio.

Some types of audio can give you an almost convincing pitch shift with a lot of tonal clarity. Others give a crazy mess of choppy madness. Or you can mis-set it for buffer-override types of pitched stuttering and random chipmunk echo, or the other way for harsh grinding robotic effects. You might even get it to act like a pitch shifter!

One of the greats, if you like sonic digital craziness.

Date February 19, 2007
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

Chris

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