Airwindows

Yaeltex ConsoleX is available! (and a mini-me version!)

TL;DW: rightly so, it’s a half hour video.

AirwindowmationForReaper.zip (14k) is just some text files in a folder.

This is an announcement and an update! You can buy ConsoleX to run ConsoleX (the MIDI controller I have, to run my ConsoleX plugins) here:
https://yaeltex.com/product/consolex/

You can also jump directly to the ‘Factory’ pages for this and the Mini-Me version, with these links (they will open a controller-editor web page that lets you play with the design tools without making you buy anything):
Factory Build for ConsoleX with faders
Factory Build for the ConsoleX Mini version

If you want to set up the fader version, or just have faders and want to run Airwindowmation, the zip up top is the latest version! I’m using it currently. It wasn’t easy to set up but I managed it, and once it’s there and working it’s less trouble to operate.

The changes to it are all about what the fader position translates to. I was making mixes and the faders all had to sit really low, so the new Airwindowmation takes the input position, and gives the plugin that position… to the power of the number of tracks OF that color, plus one!

All that means is, for single tracks it adds a ‘taper’ so the fader can ride in the middle of its travel. And then, if you layer on lots more tracks onto that colorcoded fader, the taper changes so it always wants to have ‘normal mix volume’ in the middle of the fader’s travel. No matter how many tracks it controls, the value of the fader will be able to drop to zero at the bottom of the fader, and if you crank it all the way up you’ll get full crank no matter how many tracks there are. It just makes them all use the middle of the fader as ‘normal volume’.

My hope is, that’s an easy and natural way to pass fader settings into the ConsoleX plugin’s fader control, by colorcoding the tracks to go along with faders.

I get nothing from Yaeltex, this is just because I made my design there and like their controllers. I don’t think there’s any kind of price break, either. It’s just me letting you start with my designs (or just use them directly if you like) and get a controller like the one I got :)

Date February 28, 2025
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Elliptical

TL;DW: Elliptical highpasses the side channel.

Elliptical in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Bass’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Elliptical.zip (504k) standalone(AU, VST2)

So this is by request: I got asked whether it was possible for me to make a great elliptical EQ. And of course I said ‘well, ToVinyl does that though it also does some other things’, and it’s been a while since I did ToVinyl plus it’s partly designed to produce sound as if it’s FROM vinyl, with the groovewear control (which itself became other plugins like GrooveWear and CrunchyGrooveWear), and what if I was able to do a standalone elliptical EQ that’s way better?

Here’s how I did. ToVinyl uses a weird early technique I liked, trying to steepen a very simple IIR filter by using many poles: this would be great if it worked! Instead, it doesn’t really steepen nearly as much, and then it’s implemented in a way where it kinda resonates. End result is almost a ‘color’ EQ, with huge amounts of phase shifting: it will take a distorted bassy clipped noise and turn it into giant bass peaks over a wide range, and that’s ToVinyl.

And so I was asked back then if I could make a better highpass, just a stereo mastering highpass, by Gregg of Hermetech Mastering, and Hermepass took shape, with way fewer poles but arranged differently: going up to the desired point, but then with each new pole dropping back by the Golden Ratio towards roughly 20 hz at the lowest, and lastly the poles got introduced with mini dry/wet controls between each step, something that got used in the four stages of cascaded filtering in the Z series filters, but Hermepass had this for six stages of increasingly deeper cutoff.

It remains a solid, tonally clear highpass filter: not a brickwall, but one where you can cut the lows and really not hear where the cut is. That’s the intention. And that’s where I got the highpass for Elliptical. If you like the one you’ll like the other. The interesting thing about using it for an elliptical filter is, you can filter incredibly hard without hearing it change the sound. In demonstrating it I had to make use of Golem, to show an out-of-phase sound that’s literally just the side channel. Otherwise, it fools you into thinking everything’s still full bass.

And of course that’s the goal with an elliptical filter: these aren’t about sound effects, they’re about stopping the side channel from modulating the depth of a vinyl groove, or about using stereo woofers most efficiently. And that’s where Elliptical shines. Keep Golem handy if you have to spot check what the filter’s doing, find useful settings and then trust that even though it sounds like there’s a lot of heavy stereo bass, it’s really just an illusion and Elliptical is controlling the heck out of it, while pretending the sound is unchanged :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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.

Date February 23, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

SquareRoot

TL;DW: SquareRoot has new discoveries in soft saturation!

SquareRoot in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Saturation’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
SquareRoot.zip (493k) standalone(AU, VST2)

What if saturation, but not flat-topping, because it was a kind that literally never reaches a ‘top’ but always keeps producing louder output the harder you drive it?

Well, that would defeat the purpose of safety clipping, first of all, but then let’s see what else we can do :)

I don’t think sqrt() commonly gets used for saturation effects, for several reasons. First, it’s wildly inaccurate at tiny values. Second, it won’t safety clip (obviously). Third, if you DO try to use it even though it’s wildly inaccurate at tiny values, it turns and bites you, throwing in a crossover distortion that can be really distracting. You’ve heard it… if you heard LRConvolve, because that uses a square root to compensate for how you’re multiplying one channel by the other.

There’s no solution to these things, but is there a workaround? YES. And it’s called ‘Soar’.

Turns out you can adjust how the square root works to get a smooth contour that still gives you that infinitely-extended softclip. It’s a useful effect, that feels kinda like how our ears respond to loudness. If you have something like a drum track that’s all spikey and doesn’t sound anything like being there, SquareRoot at some level of drive (you can add as much as 12 dB in the plugin, and nearly a hundred dB with BitShiftGain in front of it) will immediately give it that ‘there in the room’ feel while still distinguishing dynamics for you.

And then there’s ‘Soar’ sitting there: all it does is change this adjustment from full smoothness… to uncorrected, nonlinear square root quirkiness. And that throws in controllable amounts of crossover distortion, Class B or AB distortion (since it’s not a sharp edge but increasingly weird curves) and that makes quiet details louder, unnaturally so.

It lets you keep that effect subtle (like the eccentricities of a big push-pull tube amp, or a grungey Hammond B3) or make it really obnoxious: then if you overdrive the input harder, that Soar coloration will become more subtle again, because you’ll have to turn the output down. If even the plain output with no ‘Soar’ is too intense, you get a dry/wet control that should be able to help you find just the right intensity for whatever SquareRoot can produce.

Soar is originally from a story by Mixerman, who used a stray knob to appease a difficult record label exec sitting in on a session. In the story, it was not real. But this is! Right down to the dangers of adding TOO MUCH soar and ruining everything. So, be prudent and don’t soar too much!

This is bonkers for getting retro tones, for simulating acoustic loudness (you can put it in front of Discontinuity for even more loudness cues!) and for giving certain instruments their natural color, like big amps and wonky organs. The effect exists in guitar stompboxes as a notoriously aggro pedal: ZVex’s Machine pedal. But this plugin is not that, it’s a separate effect with its own purposes that happens to be one of the few effects to work with crossover distortion, normally not a popular effect, but now rendered accessible and useful.

I know I’ll be finding uses for all this, and I hope you do too :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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.

Date February 16, 2025
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

CansAW

TL;DW: CansAW is Chris’s Airwindows room, in a plugin, for headphone mixers.

CansAW in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Utility’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
CansAW.zip (562k) standalone(AU, VST2)

This is pretty straightforward. Remember Cans? Every possible control room sound from compact to huge, adjustable any way you like?

This is the Airwindows presets. That’s all.

By that I mean: I’ve been developing my mix room, where I do all my work, for years. By now I’ve got speakers, subwoofers (stereo), extensive room treatment, multiple mix check positions up to and including a stairwell at the back that leads up to a small hallway, from which you can hear how a mix hits a much larger space and how it’ll work there. I have to close all the doors like to my bedroom to use that mix position, and I’ve shown it on mixing livestreams (though miking it can get hissy as I’m not using live-gig levels here). It’s real-world acoustics used to better document how a mix works in different situations, and it works really well, better than anything you could do over headphones.

And I’ve made a version of Cans that does these exact mix positions, including the hallway mix check, and while it is not as good as real life… it’s not bad, not bad at all. It tells you some of the same things. It worked, in other words.

This is for me as much as you. If it’s out there, even if my house gets flattened by a meteor or perhaps Elon Musk experiencing a nuclear K-hole, and I survive the meteor or madman, and I have a laptop and some headphones, I can work after a fashion :) there’s enough out there whether it’s publically available tracks from my own music or new synths like Six Sines or my perennial fave Surge XT (which can fire one-shot percussion samples off the wavetable osc), and of course I can download ConsoleX just like anybody (making progress on helping Yaeltex put out the control surface I designed!) and that means I, like anybody else, have access to some of the universe of free audio stuff, that universe that’s become so broad that I can even do the music I care about, with just a bunch of downloading open source projects :)

Of course if the meteor gets me all bets are off and you’re gonna have trouble getting ConsoleH out of anybody else. But that’s why I’m burning the midnight oil (well, up-very-early firewood?) to keep making stuff: I’m not done and I’ve got even more exciting stuff than ConsoleX in the works, as well as lots of extra support stuff to put everything in gear, and studio tricks to give audio (that can be sampled and re-used) that hasn’t been heard right for decades. Starting to figure all that out, and I hope I can convey my enthusiasm.

For today, here’s CansAW. You can get to any setting in it using Cans (it’s all Room D, for a start). But each setting is dialed in as exactly as I could get it, using real acoustical audio for reference, in the mix environment I’ve been developing for years. If I had access to all the mix rooms in the world I’d give you the approximation of those as well, but here’s my place, in the box :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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.

Date February 9, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Chris

Yaeltex ConsoleX is available! (and a mini-me version!)

Elliptical

SquareRoot

CansAW

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

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