Airwindows

Compressor

Compressor is a weird little beast! If you’re looking for a great sounding, well-behaved, sane compressor, go buy the most recent Logical. This is not that.

What it IS, is Airwindows strangeness in an exceedingly pure form.

You get compression, attack speed, release speed, color, makeup gain, and dry/wet.

Compression includes some makeup gain adjusting. Don’t crank it out unless you want a rude shock, this plugin can put out VERY loud outputs.

Attack speed is faster as the control’s turned up. At slower attack speeds, the plugin’s actually putting a delay on the sensor, like anti-lookahead, to produce bigger transient spikes. This is in effect very early, so one interesting side effect is that the compression artifacts totally stop connecting to the waveforms, especially at very slow values. That’s uncommon for software compressors.

Release speed’s also faster as the control’s turned up. If you crank both, it’s very sputtery while still being unmanageably spikey. Slowing down attack speed gives you big fat chunky attack transients that are instantly suppressed.

Color is like a distortion that can get obnoxious on some sounds. It’s pretty much JUST an overdrive put on the front of the compressor before anything gets compressed. It’ll distort things before the comp gets ’em, if you want to stop the comp from getting knocked back too hard.

Makeup Gain is probably going to have to be set very low. This thing really jumps around when hit with program material. It’s more a suggestion than a straight-up output level control. Dry/Wet is what you’d expect, thankfully.

The biggest strength of this thing is squishing stuff like drums in such a way that the transient spike pokes out unreasonably, and making odd washy floating textures. It’s VERY HARD to control. It does manage a certain ‘fluid’ tone exceptionally well: up to you if you think that’s worth the effort. It’s free, have fun wrestling with the wild plugin.

Date February 19, 2007
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

BassDrive

BassDrive is truly a secret weapon, in that it’s a pet plugin for the notorious Slipperman! I kept it under wraps for years but now the secret identity of Slippy is known, and so too the secret of the plugin can be. I will tell all. And to be fair, this one isn’t becoming a freebie. I’m going to tie it to Golem, another Slippernian plugin, and with a bit of luck he will approve of me not starving and all, and appreciate me not outright throwing it in the freebie bin.

Remember, you have to know how to use these things. Here’s why BassDrive found favor.

All it is, literally, is an early four-band EQ implemented Airwindows fashion. It’s not even all Airwindows EQ code, it’s the only example of ‘cookbook’ EQ curves Airwindows has. Technically, they’re implemented like little convolution kernels, and they are also interleaved (which isn’t normal).

But more than that, they are implemented in such a way that every EQ band gets a saturation curve. The harder you ‘push’ the bands, the more they come forward in the mix. This is vital to voicing up-front sounds, it means you can spatially contour a sound rather than just fiddle with frequency components.

The bands are super-aggressive, though the highs are crazier than the lows. Then, there’s the drive control on the end, which is just another saturation stage.

Be aware of one thing: CStrip (and its precursor EQ) do the same thing as this. They do it less extremely and less aggressively, but they’re doing the same thing. BassDrive is just the one that can throw on sick boosts, the one that voices the bands differently and more rigidly than CStrip does, and with an extra gain stage to gel everything together.

If that works for you, you can have BassDrive. To get it, buy a copy of Golem (yes, a basic sort of utility for $50 but now you know it comes with a secret plugin) and ask for BassDrive in email. I’ll send it.

Date February 19, 2007
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Ambience

Ambience is an early Airwindows plugin that uses the concept of Haas effect (or, precedence effect, or law of first wavefront) to fill in additional sonic information in a way that doesn’t mask the initial transient.

It does this in an interesting way: it’s calling on lots of individual delay taps from 811 to 7883 samples, but most heavily weighted at 883 samples (neatly within Haas effect at 44.1K). The method of doing this is a little unusual but worth documenting.

Ambience starts off by applying a whole bunch of delay taps to a temp value (back this early I was running delay buffers as 32 bit ints and converting them back to floating point for the output). Then it divides the whole thing by 4—and goes on adding a bunch more delay taps, less widely distributed. Then it divides that by 4—and so on. By the time it’s got to that final tap, the initial big burst of delay taps as late as 7883 samples have been divided by 4 many times. It uses this technique to scale back each delay tap without having to multiply or divide each time.

This was meant as an efficiency thing, but what it also does is make the most heavily processed parts of the sound, the quietest. The one tap that carries most of the load, is applied with virtually no processing. Turns out that has its advantages as well, in that the tone’s bigger when your math isn’t buried in endless calculations. Ambience actually applies this ‘ambient slapback’ sound like this:

*destP = *sourceP+((Float64)(temp/(8388352.0))*wet);

It’s pretty impossible to get the dry tone (sourceP) any more directly than that, though this is NOT the ultimate in high-resolution digital audio processing. That would be noise shaping the overflow from that calculation (as shown, the Ambience output ‘temp’ is given as a 64 bit number, but the buss is only 32 bit). However, this is still a very direct sort of ambience generator. Hope it’s useful!

Date February 17, 2007
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

Ensemble

Ensemble is pretty unique. Not because it’s so great, but because it’s flawed in distinctive ways.

It’s designed to be a sort of super-ultra-chorus, using tons of delay taps in a carefully calculated way to make a whole orchestra out of, say, one string.

Instead, it sort of makes a Solina String Ensemble out of one string. The result is a totally different, and totally unnatural, texture. The depth of texture-smoothing you get from increasing the number of voices. Then, the Fullness control doesn’t really do ‘fullness’. Instead, it’s like sweeping a fixed flange, and at the top it sort of all merges together into a tubby and unpleasant tone. There’s a brightness enhance like with Chorus and Chorus Ensemble and the other Airwindows modulation plugs, but no real way to get realism out of it.

And none of that matters… if what you wanted was to get an unrealistic but slick wash of sound.

Use the Ensemble control as a ‘suck more lows out’ control. It’ll progressively make the sound leaner and more diffuse at the same time. More = thinner.

Use the Fullness control as a ‘slide the fixed flange’ control to voice the thing. It won’t want you to slide it while audio is playing, it’ll glitch. Set it for tone, not for ‘fullness’.

Use the Brightness to voice the top-end, and have fun with your retro-fake textures!

Date February 14, 2007
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

Chris

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