Airwindows

ResEQ2

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

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

Sweeten

TL;DW: Sweeten is where you can find super-clean second harmonic.

Sweeten.zip(492k)

So this serves a few purposes. Sweeten is one of the super-minimal, one knob plugins. It makes second harmonic: much like SingleEndedTriode, or Inflamer. The first purpose is to exist, so if you’re thinking ‘I gotta sweeten this sound, now which Airwindows plugin of the three billion and twelve does that? Conflagration? No, that can’t be it’ then you can go ‘is there one literally called Sweeten’, and now there is! And it does what you’d expect, even harmonics (second harmonic, specifically). That’s all it does.

Another purpose is because I use stuff like this in my designs. So it’s useful to have a chunk of code that I can take and put in the midrange section of an EQ, or something, if I think it’s lacking that subtle nonlinearity which comes out of some circuits. Sweeten is specifically designed to let me do that quickly and easily, and if I make a tool for myself which is actually neat and efficient, I give it to people.

The only thing Sweeten can do that you can’t already do with Inflamer is be simple, and maybe one or two fewer math operations, and that’s IT. This isn’t new (second harmonic isn’t new, either). My hope is that it’s such an elegant, easily identifiable little device that it’ll come in handy. It’s also using the stepped-control, bit-shift-gain thing I do lately, so one thing about it is that it’ll prevent you overprocessing. If you turn it up until you can hear it a little too well, drop back a step and then you can’t tell it’s doing anything, but it very much still is. For many types of processing (second harmonic emphatically included!) the optimal setting is where it’s doing its thing but at no point is it ever distracting or sticking out as a mixing mistake. Sweeten is predisposed to quickly get you to that point with no fuss.

I’ll be using it: if anybody else finds it useful, that’s even better :)

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 3, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Inflamer

TL;DW: Inflamer is an Airwindowsized take on the waveshapers in Oxford Inflator.

Inflamer.zip(501k)

How do you take a famous, beloved plugin and make it better?

In a recent livestream, I saw a video make the very convincing argument that the famous Oxford Inflator is the combination of two very simple waveshapers. Like, spectacularly simple. One’s a bit more complicated than the other, and one is essentially just second harmonic, nothing more. The person making the video set up the two simple waveshapers and demonstrated that for all manner of settings on the real Inflator, they could make a Melda waveshaper produce identical outputs.

Of course, you didn’t get the UI. You didn’t get the band splitter. There’s a clip meter of some sort: also not included. However this meter, these controls work: nope. But… now there are algorithms that are public, some of ’em so simple as to defy property (hard to argue that you can own one line of code that makes things second harmonic, it’d be like me claiming to own sin() )

What could you do, to make this better in any way?

Well, that’s where my recent experiments come in. Meet Airwindows Inflamer (NOT Inflator). It doesn’t do the same things, quite. There’s no band splitter. There’s a curve control, but it doesn’t go -50 to +50, it goes from 0 to 1. And while it blends the two waveshapers… it does so in a more cumbersome and possibly more pure way.

Inflamer is different because it’s using my BitShiftGain style gain trimming, internally, as if it was a dry/wet, but with the two waveshapers instead of a dry and a wet. The Drive control is also bit shifts (very accurate divisions by powers of 2). The Effect control, as with the real Inflator, is normal and is in fact a dry/wet, and there you can have subtle adjustments to what is, I hope, a sonically optimized version of the effect.

But you cannot have the band splitting, or fine gradations of Curve. In fact many settings of Curve will end up being a slight volume drop when used at unity gain (Drive in the middle). It is possible a bunch of people will shoot this out against the real, iLoked, for pay, bestseller plugin, and will decide mine is crap because it is often quieter than the real one.

GOOD. I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade. You have to know what you’re doing to evaluate this. It’s much like how, when I start doing takes on Bricasti, they’ll be in my own style. I am not cloning things, even when the underlying algorithms are trivially simple. Inflamer is different and the range of adjustments are in 6 dB steps on Curve and Drive and often you might find the result comes into the mix 3 or more dB quieter than it would from the Sony plugin, and that’s as it should be.

And if I’m correct that leaning on these insights into digital math gives their own kind of benefits, I’ve managed to make an Inflamer which is more mastering-grade, more transparent and sonorous, and better sounding (IF you can live with the only settings I allow you to pick) than the real one. That’s why I’m restricting it the way I am.

There you have it. Inflamer is obviously not Oxford Inflator, has less options and restricted choices, and if you shoot them out head to head without matching levels carefully, it will probably always come out quieter than Oxford Inflator. And it is only some waveshapers, simplified and restricted even more than the original.

And for some, it’ll be just better, in critical listening. Sometimes it takes radical methods to beat an already stellar plugin. I hope you like Inflamer, and that it doesn’t inflame you too much, unless you like that sort of thing.

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 August 27, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Chris

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