Airwindows

ConsoleLA

TL;DW: ConsoleLA is the Airwindows take on the Quad Eight console.

APIs and Neves and MCI, oh my… well, ConsoleLA emulates the most incredible console you’ve never heard of. This thing was the sound of LA in the seventies. It’s on the back cover of Steely Dan records, it’s been seen in Tom Scholz’s basement, and it’s heard even on classic 70s LA and Hollywood and San Francisco records it didn’t make… because it’s the production model of a whole lineage of West Coast custom recording consoles with similar designs and circuitry. And you can still get them, apparently, the company lives… but I don’t know where, or for how much, or how, as there’s no sign of prices or any way to get them. There’s none on Reverb, Vintage King doesn’t have any, good luck even finding channel strips…

Meet the Quad Eight.

This sound echoes through the Seventies. Tons of Steely Dan, tons of Zappa, Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell… that’s not even counting the wilder sightings, like when people figured this console mixed The Wall, or hearing it on Yes’s Relayer album. The thing is, this was THE big production console before the days of Neve and API and SSL. Quad Eight were the first to go into production and come up with a recording console that you could just buy, set up, and use. Before them, you had to build your own.

Quad Eight were (are, since the website says they can still make you gear) supplying the film industry, and it shows. These desks are amazing at making movies for your ears. (in the Zappa phrase, on the Hot Rats album, which was done at the Whitney studios in Glendale the year before they got a Neve, so that album was likely also Quad Eight or a kindred West Coast console)

ConsoleLA, like ConsoleMC before it, is a bit of a different approach to emulating these great old dinosaurs, some still things you could conceivably find and have, some forever lost. The thing is, this is the nearest thing to custom point-to-point wiring of discrete transistors. On top of that, the Quad Eight ran a higher supply voltage than anybody: negative 28 to positive 28 volts, for enormous energy and headroom. The way to get these sounds is not layer upon layer of ‘digital emulation’ but trying to get the behaviors right with minimal, atypical algorithms. Only then can you get the energy and sonority of the real Quad Eight.

The filtering is a whole other thing from the MCI. No mid peak here. The slopes are more gradual, but you can cut the hell out of the mids, and the deeper into the Seventies we got, the deeper the midrange cuts became. What I’ve done with ConsoleLA is try to make the simplest, most approachable Console system that can get the widest range of sounds as heard on these records, and reward you when you pursue music-recording in the old school, human way.

This doubtless won’t be the last, but it might just end up being my favorite. I hope you like ConsoleLA :)

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 December 25, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 8 Comments

ZOutputStage

TL;DW: ZOutputStage is the output clipping from the Emu e6400 style Z filters.

ZOutputStage.zip(504k)

So I didn’t get asked for this, exactly.

I got asked for the exciter setting out of the Emu e6400 Ultra. And this isn’t it.

But I did have an exciter (and so have you, as it’s in the plugin collection.) I’m sure it’s weirder and twitchier than the Emu one, but it does exist. It just won’t sound anything like that sampler, because the sampler has a lot of hardware on the analog outs, as well as being probably a totally different algorithm than mine, one that I have no idea how it’s done.

Wait a second.

The reason I got asked for this was, drum and bass guys in the UK wanted to add some insane grind and energy, to basically synth waves. And I don’t have the algo for that… but my exciter is nothing if not insane, and I did an output stage on the Z filters. That would apply exactly the same to an exciter, or anything else. I’d just do it as a simple distortion, except that rather than being a normal distortion it’d use the special filtering used in the Z filters to get that ‘frizz’ on the edges of clipped sounds that I clearly saw in the recordings of the real e6400. If it did that on distorting filters, it would do the same on an exciter, or anything.

And so I did :)

This goes after… well, anything. Whatever you like. Turn it up past 0.1 to distort, just like the Z filters. Turn the output way down because it’s really hot. Apply to whatever digital mayhem you can wreak, and it should act a little more like it’s coming off that sampler.

See ya next week :)

I’ve had to update this in place as the output gain was way too loud, so if you need to replicate the original release of it you can get the original files at ZOutputStageOriginal.zip(504k)

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 December 17, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

kCathedral

TL;DW: kCathedral is a giant reverby space.

kCathedral.zip(593k)

Here’s a neat little experiment! As always with the K reverbs, it’s a dedicated sound space with its own unique algorithm… but there are some new twists making kCathedral a step along an interesting path. This is the first of the Bricasti-inspired reverbs!

It uses a 5×5 Householder matrix, and a built-in crossover (a SubTight filter, so it’s not even a normal type of filter) to allow for extra delay on the lows. The internal reverb filtering is Pear filters rather than the biquads used on the kPlates. (the reverb is undersampled at high sample rates, so the SubTight crossover will work the same whether at 1x, 2x, or 4x.)

And for all that trouble… kCathedral does NOT sound the same as the Bricasti Cathedral preset. You won’t find a clone here.

But… it will produce largely the same depth and spatiality, with a different texture that is less ‘rich and soft’ and more ‘stark and vibey’. It should be used similarly: for realism, hide it behind other sounds by keeping it quiet. There are no controls other than a dry/wet: for use on an aux, go full wet, and if you’re using it inline you might end up adding just the tiniest amount (in the video, I’m using 0.03 of it on my voice, and you’ll barely notice it until it switches to similarly faint ClearCoat 7, just for a sentence, after having mentioned ClearCoat.)

My hope for these is distinctness, and kCathedral might not be the one to reach for as an ‘all-purpose’ reverb, because it’s just a first step into a larger, more echoey new world. The thing I like about it is, while it has a distinct sound, the spatiality sits in the mix roughly the same way a real Bricasti might, even while the texture is different (will be interesting to see if I can get closer to that butter tone, in future).

All in all, a good day at work (okay, months) and I hope you enjoy kCathedral :)

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 December 10, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

SubTight Redux

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 (except in September when it came out).

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.

The thing is, it’s not really increasingly steep, not at all. And it’s not even a lowpass, because its behavior is so dynamics-dependent. But it’s not a saturation (or anti-saturation) either, because it’s slew that’s being softclipped, not amplitude. This is why I initially released it believing it shouldn’t be scaled by sample rate: it’s a very odd sort of processing.

Having put out a Redux version that applies corrections to make it consistent across sample rates, what do we get? SubTight does NOT get steeper as you increase the ‘steep’ control, unless you think of it as ‘low settings are pretty weak tea, and cranking it up gets you a much stronger and more intense brew’.

What you’ll get is a behavior: as you increase the trim on SubTight, the weakness and flabbiness will get sucked out of the bass. With very low Steep settings it’s pretty across the board, really. It’s not hyping the highs so much as it is pulling softness and ‘glue’ out of all the frequencies, more as it goes lower. Super nonlinear, super tricky to interpret, but dramatic and energetic.

As you increase Steepness, it gets more aggressive about this. It’s like you’re defining a little ‘nega-zone’ inside the bass and the solidness of the sound, and then making it vanish, so the transients hit with full power from a more silent, empty backdrop. Probably handy on spot drum mics in general, where you’d use gating to make them punch more! The farther you push Steep, the more it tries to refine that ’empty space’ down into a tiny intense core at the center of the sub-bass… but it will continue to affect everything, because it’s not a filter and Steep isn’t a crossover. It’s sort of a strength control. I’ve generally got my use out of it between 0.2 and 0.4, but I provide more extreme settings because of course I do that, you should know me by now ;)

I admit this is still a strange plugin, but hopefully it is both more adaptable and better explained now. If it’s no use to you directly, you may still appreciate the way it brings a distinct lifelike sound to ConsoleMC, and other things like that :)

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 December 3, 2023
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Chris

ConsoleLA

ZOutputStage

kCathedral

SubTight Redux

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