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Chris

Hi! I've got a new plugin you can have! These plugins come in Mac AU, and Mac, Windows and Linux VST. They are state of the art sound, have no DRM, and have totally minimal generic interface so you focus on your sounds.

Creature

TL;DW: Creature is a soft slew saturator, a new class of noisechanger.

Creature.zip(500k)

So here’s something new: didn’t exist before, even I didn’t have it.

Creature is a soft slew saturator. It’s a way of working with applying a sin() function to slew clipping. In fact it applies an unbounded sin() function, so it might be technically considered a slew wavefolder? Because that’s what everybody needed, was a slew wavefolder. How useful, nerdy, and pointless.

Not so much. Listen to this little monster.

Creature is up to 32 (or more, at high sample rates) soft slew saturators, stacked up like the poles of a filter. It acts like a distortion, except it’s not a distortion. It acts like a filter, but it’s even less of a filter. Its interaction with sample rate is really strange (has to scale up with the square root of the sample rate multiplier!)

And what Creature really does, is roar.

As you keep adding Depth, the gain and the thunder increase unreasonably. The total force on tap is pretty ridiculous, and it keeps getting harder to control as you turn it up. There’s an Inv control that can give you a really interesting cancellation that acts like a highpass-ish, but not like any highpass you’ve ever heard. Using it in phase, in Wet mode, unleashes a monstrous overdrive with humongous bass that refuses to lose weight even at impossibly high gains (real interesting on drum rooms!)

There is no overdrive. There is no EQ. There is no highpass.

It’s just Creature, which is very much its own beast. It’s also a very, very simple algorithm (isn’t that so often the way?) so especially at low Depth settings, all this monstrousness can be yours for almost no CPU. I’ll be finding ways to put this to use, but as always, you’ve got it fresh from the plugin forges. Be careful, and have fun with your new Creature.

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

EveryConsole

TL;DW: EveryConsole is mix-and-match Airwindows Console.

EveryConsole.zip(529k)

Sometimes I give people tools AS I am working on them…

EveryConsole contains the original Console algorithm, Console6, Console7, the sin()/asin() routine that’s the guts of Console8 and PurestConsoles 1 and 2, BShifty which is the near-sin() approximation that’s in PurestConsole3 from last week, and Console Zero.

All of these algorithms are stripped of all the tone shaping parts and ultrasonic filterings to be the bare-minimum functions for their purposes. That doesn’t mean they are every Airwindows saturation routine: Distortion has more. But these are all the ones designed to encode and then decode on the buss.

And, EveryConsole includes both the Channel functions, and the Buss functions, under one hood. So you basically select the version you want, and whether it’s channel or buss.

Because there’s no filtering or tone shaping these lend themselves to oversampling, for instance Reaper’s new oversampling. That doesn’t mean it’ll be better: I think it kinda won’t, but if you have oversampling capacity this is now yours to fool with. EveryConsole gives you access to the raw encode/decode functions without making you use them in an Airwindows way.

That’s not why I made it, though. I’m working on modeling the sound of big classic consoles, and I’ve got a lot of audio reference, and I needed to do a lot of study of how different Console versions combined. I’m already working on doing tone shaping to get closer to the target, and I wondered whether mismatching Console versions got you types of presentations that reminded the listener of specific big consoles.

That would be a YES.

So I’m busily at work using this plugin to monitor a lot of variations on Console and compare them to classic records, and if I get to have a tool then so do you! So, here is EveryConsole. If you’d like to combine it with the distributed ultrasonic filtering I like to use, then load up UltrasonX or HypersonX and arrange the instances of those so they’re in the right places around the EveryConsole instances. If you’d like more like Console7’s ability to bring elements forward and back in mix, or Console8’s tone, you have to use those as there’s extra stuff built into the plugins. But if you want more basic building blocks to assemble your own Airwindows big console… this is for you as much as it is for me.

Hope you like it!

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

PurestConsole3

TL;DW: PurestConsole3 is an alternate algorithm for minimalist Console.

PurestConsole3.zip(957k)

Instead of immediately doing EveryConsole, how about the final Console version it’ll contain?

This serves two purposes. First, it’s an extension of the work I was doing in ConsoleZero: this is a custom sin()/asin() implementation along Airwindows lines, making it a little unusual. It uses a simple sin() approximation, but instead of being mathematically correct it applies all the multiplications and divides only in factors of two: bit shifts, in other words.

This is what ConsoleZero did, but more simply. This extends that to improve the sin()/asin() calculation, but then it’s not doing that correctly, it’s another approximation to make every calculation preserve the mantissas of the numbers as much as possible, every step of the way. Doesn’t matter if it seems like a ridiculous thing to do, that’s the experiment, and you already have this in mathematically perfect sin()/asin() form anyway: the original PurestConsole is just that.

The thing is, there are other gains. These new algorithms do so much with bit shifts that they’re blazingly fast. Both this and ConsoleZero run fifteen tracks of mix on my M1 MacBook Pro at about 5% CPU, with a couple bonus plugins in there.

And that means if you’re running something like current Reaper, as I am… with chain and individual FX oversampling… you can do that. And so I’ve made a video where I’m demonstrating a 96k project mixed in PurestConsole3, with ALL the Console plugins oversampled to 768k. (unless, because it’s starting at 96k, the 16x oversampling is actually giving me 1.536 megahertz oversampling?)

And it went from 5% CPU, with presumably 16x oversampling on all Console tracks and the buss, at base 96k sampling rate, to 30% CPU. I could’ve doubled the project and it would still have run. (probably the original PurestConsole would not be able to do this)

And it sounds… different! You’ll hear it. You surely can do it. It’s got its own sound. Not an Airwindows sound, I think. Sort of smoothed off and glossy. In the video I demonstrate this output, versus non-oversampled PurestConsole3, versus ConsoleZero. And, having heard all the original sounds off my instruments and modular, I think ConsoleZero is rawer and more accurate (that’s sort of the idea). But now, if you have a great love for oversampled nonlinear plugins, PurestConsole3 is my little gift, an Airwindows Console version that’s designed to work with, not against, what you like.

Have fun, and I’ll keep new stuff coming as well as I can!

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

EverySlew

TL;DW: EverySlew is a wide variety of unique sound processing tools.

EverySlew.zip(501k)

Where to even begin? This is the Swiss Army Chainsaw of treble processing plugins. It’ll do Slew, GoldenSlew, PlatinumSlew, or any combination of them, forwards, backwards and inside out. I hesitate even to recommend it as there is no real introduction to it, or any other plugin or processor that will really teach you how to use it. If you’d like to just tame unruly high frequencies, you can still use GoldenSlew or PlatinumSlew, and as long as you can still hear audio coming out you’re fine (don’t crank up Slew or GoldenSlew all the way to 1.0 unless you want to sample and hold, because they will do what you asked).

But if you’re still reading, here’s what you get extra in EverySlew, which is mainly for me to use developing versions of Console that sound like real analog desks.

Firstly, the Depth control gives you number of stages, with full crank being the equivalent of GoldenSlew or PlatinumSlew. For many sounds there will be no difference between the full ten stages those have, and much fewer. It’ll be hard to hear. Fewer stages means lighter CPU load, so I’ll be finding optimal settings here, but it also means less of the ‘golden’ effect when given extreme inputs. When used to take off only the brightest highs (more on that later) you can use fewer stages with no penalty. Two or three should suffice: 0.2 or 0.3 or so.

Secondly, the Halo control gives you a terrifying, industrial meltdown of a sound that also introduces attenuation into the deep bass. I called it Halo because it brings in an odd sparkliness and energy that could come in handy. It uses another level of previous-sample to try and identify actual corners, changes in the angle of the wave, like my DeEss and Acceleration plugins do. I’ve never got this algorithm to work until now: having made it work, it’s a strange and unruly thing. Realistic settings will all be rather low, especially if Slew is anything like obvious. HIgh Halo settings are a kind of terrible distortion I’ve never quite heard before: I expect this to be used in anger to make some very aggressive noises not quite like any other (which is always handy, right?)

Lastly, you’ve now got a dry/wet. But not JUST a dry/wet, an Inv/Dry/Wet. Dry is 0.5 on the control. Crank it up and you have full wet… but set it to Inv, and you can make it cancel out the dry signal. When you do that, it shows you only the bits that are slew clipping, and silences everything else. So, for the first time, it’s a slew clipper where you can monitor the clipping only, and directly hear exactly what the thing is doing. And this is handy, because the effect is very hard to hear at the levels it should be used! It will tend to make things sound exactly like they already did, except with glue and space in the mix, combing over the stray edges and points. Setting it to Inv means you can hear the points being put into place. Also, if you’re using Halo, you can hear when that begins to reshape the effect, bringing in lows and so on.

EverySlew isn’t for everybody. I made it because I’ll need it. I share it because that’s what I do. If you’re the sort of person to like this sort of thing, I hope you like it :)

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

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