Airwindows

Console8Lite

TL;DW: Console8Lite is simplified Console8, working with just a single mix buss.

Here’s a useful update on Console8! The original Console8 was unlike any other Airwindows Console, as it’s designed to be used only in a Channel/Submix/Buss configuration. Its ultrasonic filtering needs to run through all three stages in order to be set up right. Yet, Console8 also introduced other things: a custom distributed highpass algorithm for acting more like real-world analog circuits, treble softening to mimic the use of transformers, and as a result you got a distinctive sound that wasn’t present in more purist Console versions.

Enter Console8Lite! Bear in mind that the full three-stage Console8 will still have a slight edge in certain ways: the interactions with the ultrasonic filtering are more intense, and things like the capacitor emulation work more effectively on the larger mix topology with more stages. But there’s also a place for simpler, more direct mixers, and that’s where Console8Lite comes in.

It’s designed from the ground up to bring all the Console8 features but in simpler, traditional Airwindows Console form. You put the channel plugins last on each channel, have the faders at unity gain, and put the buss plugin first on the buss. Everything else, from the custom highpassing to the treble softening to the ability to boost the buss output into an on-board version of ClipOnly2, is there in the simpler form, easier to set up and ready to bring analog tone to your DAW mix.

When using it, set it up like any pre-8 version of Console. Use it as a replacement for Console8, though each plugin is roughly equivalent to a Console8 stage’s In and Out run in series: if you mix and match it with Console8 full version it’ll function but the ultrasonic filtering will no longer be calibrated.

Hope you like the new, simpler and more direct Console8Lite :)

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 February 19, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Weight

TL;DW: Weight is a very accurate sub-bass boost based on Holt.

Weight.zip(493k)

Weight is a plugin I made for me. Especially when I record live drums to simple stereo mics, or a DI bass, or indeed a guitar through an iso cab, I’ll often want a little extra deep sub-bass. There’s plenty of EQs I could reach for, to do that.

Recently I worked on Holt2, which Weight is based on, and I found it had an ability to bring up a really vivid, resonant bass boost. It’s a somewhat nonlinear algorithm, and with Holt2 I added a bunch of stages, more poles of filtering, with controls for how much resonance you wanted to get to.

Weight just focuses on the ‘very resonant’ zone. I tuned it using Voxengo SPAN (as there’s no specific formula for tuning this to any particular frequency, I had to discover what produced the right tunings) and set it up to gently go from pretty resonant, to very resonant at full crank. Weight can be tuned from 20 hz to 120 hz, which should cover a good range of sub-bass. The boost is to be applied by ear, and in many situations will be a change in character, not a big jump in overall bass level. The Weight control goes from 0 to 1, and unlike Holt it’s not a dry/wet: it’s added to what is otherwise a totally untouched signal, dry to dry-plus.

To use this, you should have extremely good subwoofers. I’m not convinced even the best headphones can really represent what this does. The Q of the filtering (zero latency, nonlinear, unusual) comes out so sharp that you can really hunt down finely grained distinctions of bass frequencies. My Monitoring plugins set to ‘Subs’ or the plugin SubsOnly, can help, by focusing in on the subs in a way that overdrives them and brings the harmonics up into the audible range. But you have to be able to hear what’s being done because it’s very specific.

The concept here is sub-bass boosting in ‘areas of power’ rather than just ‘areas of preponderant energy’ (thanks to ‘Slipperman’ for these concepts). To work with Weight, you will end up finding distinct frequencies for each instrument, in order to bring up subsonic weight in places where it is NOT already obvious. You’ll not want to reinforce muddy deep stuff that’s already there, Weight is for being able to focus in on spots where the muscle is, not just the rumble.

It’s a specialty tool, though variations on it are very likely to appear in other things, perhaps alongside a much broader, more easy to hear bass control. You can have Weight now: hope you like it :)

Date February 13, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Verbity2

TL;DW: Verbity2 adds stereo crossmodulation and expands Verbity’s feedforward reverb topology.

Verbity2.zip(570k)

Firstly, listen. Verbity2 might beat Galactic, for you, for deep reverbs. There are specific reasons why that might be. Listen and see if Verbity2 is the best reverb you can have… because you can have it, it’s open source plugins supported by Patreon. If you can’t do without it, you won’t have to, it’s yours. If you would have paid for a reverb this good, throw an additional $50 this year onto my Patreon, and we’ll see if I can make another plugin by the year after that, working on these as my full-time job.

So, how is it different from Verbity? You do still have Verbity, after all.

First, Verbity2 is an expansion. These are what’s called Householder matrix reverbs, with a feedforward topology. Verbity, and Galactic, and Chamber, use blocks of reverb elements all of which feed directly into all the other elements, in a four-by-four matrix. A Householder matrix that’s four-by-four lets you do infinite reverb while having all the elements either be unity gain, or inverted unity gain, and all my Householder stuff thus far has been like this.

Until now!

Verbity2 uses a five-by-five matrix for each stage, and where Verbity has three banks of matrices, Verbity2 has five banks of matrices. So where Verbity uses its twelve echo banks to make four thousand distinct echoes… Verbity2 uses its twenty-five echo banks to make NINE MILLION distinct echoes… before feedback. That’s not automatically ‘better’, but it’s different, like more than three orders of magnitude different. That’s going to affect the reverb texture.

About that feedback… there’s a change. So, Galactic is stereo: it applies a subtle offset vibrato to both sides on input making mono things stereo (come to think of it, would anybody like this as standalone?) and then it feeds back in a ping-pong fashion for maximum width from any source. All left reverb has to go through the entire right reverb in order to reach the left again.

Verbity is the opposite: dual mono. It was designed from the start to be an ambience-maker, filling out space around individual elements wherever they are in the stereo field. People used to buy dual hardware reverbs specifically to do this in mixes: it’s a secret mix trick, putting the verb only where it’s needed. That’s what Verbity does. And if you use NO feedback at all, Verbity2 will still do this.

But if you extend the reverb tail in Verbity2, it’s a hybrid. For each channel, two out of three of the output echo banks will stay put, and three will cross over. Half stereo spread, half keeping stuff where it is. For very long reverb tails this will always end up as a totally stereo wash. For really short ambiences, it’ll act dual mono. But for moderate reverb tails, what happens is that you get a giant room picture behind your sounds. Stuff on one side blooms out, then washes across to the other side, and back again. I’m looking forward to experimenting with this for future designs :)

There are also adjustments to tone control: the Darkness control is replaced with a control for Mulch. This is meant to be a kind of naturalness factor: Verbity, like Galactic, tends to hang on to thunderous bass, as if it expands into huge caverns. Mulch means the sound can darken, but it can also absorb some of the extreme lows, mimicking a physical room made out of wood and plaster, not stone or concrete. I should be able to expand on this a lot.

So Verbity2 is a new level of reverb realism from me. Looking forward to further developments of this!

Oh, one more thing: thanks to baconpaul of the Surge Synthesizer project, you can now download a VCV Rack module with ALL the Airwindows effects in it. The one I use (for Apple Silicon, used with the Apple Silicon beta of VCV Rack) is 1.3 megs in size. It has literally all the effects in it, well over 300 plugins in a download a little larger than just the signed audio unit for just PocketVerbs (I exaggerate: it does omit CStrip and Pafnuty as they had too many controls, and I’ll work on new versions of those). We’re going to use that technology to expand the CLAP version and maybe other things as well, and each week Paul only has to press a button for his scripts and systems to bring in each new plugin as I make it.

Open source, y’all ;) it means your results can be equal to, not each programmer added together, but each programmer multiplied by each other, much like how Verbity2 went from four thousand echoes to nine million just by doubling the amount of workload. See ya next week, and keep an eye out for a quick little Monday coding stream later this morning.

download StarterKit.zip for just the basics
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 6, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 6 Comments

CLAP

AirwindowsClap.zip(1.1M) (also on my Mediafire)

On January 24th, 2022, in a KVR forum, I stated the following: “By 2023, every Airwindows plugin will be available as CLAP natively in Linux, Windows and Mac Intel and native M1.”

I want to apologize for the last year. I got distracted by something that could have been a dream and ended up turning into a nightmare. I don’t want any I told you so’s: you don’t have all the facts and never will, and I’m a very stubborn person in some ways. I’d been leaning hard on a personal friend: it helped, but my friend died of heart complications some weeks ago (he did get to be alive and awake for an emergency helicopter ride to Dartmouth Hitchcock and I’m told he had a huge smile on his face that whole time: it had been a bucket-list thing, to ride in a helicopter). Without my friend, I could not cope with the demands of that dream I mentioned, and it turned really dark in that way you can’t come back from, and I don’t want to reveal the secrets or whys and wherefores and hope I never need to. There are some hells that should be private.

The Kalevala (in my grandmother’s translation) says, “Only I am left to sing these tales learned from riddles, snatched from the wayside, broken from the heather, torn from bushes, drawn from the waters, rubbed from blades of grass” and it may literally be true, now or tomorrow or in this next year. And I may sing the tales, and they’ll be riddles and they’ll be lies and they’ll be true, especially the ones that are lies. I’ve already begun and I will share this singing, that being all that is left of me now, as soon as I can stand to do so.

And here’s a lie: I did not keep my word above. I don’t have Linux, or Windows, and am not sure if I have both Intel and M1 Mac.

But much like in Finnish folklore, in my travels I met someone, going by ‘BaconPaul’, and it so happened that I could gift him something in the way of open source plugin code. And he and his friends used it in their Surge Synthesizer project.

And then, just casually, Paul sorta whipped up a port of my stuff to a new plugin format. For fun. Because he was ‘the-man-who-writes-new-synthesizers-and-things’, and what was impossible for me was light work for him (like in Finnish folklore). And so he weaved a Terminal spell of cmake and compile, and his magic spit out a 3.4 meg file (1.1M, zipped), and it was plugins… in CLAP format.

Which plugin? ALL OF THEM.

This is for you, those of you who can use it, for now. I think I can make it include new plugins as they come out. I don’t know if I can run it on Windows and Linux as my machines for doing those builds are air-gapped and don’t get internet access, but I might end up able to cover those bases as well. Or, I can direct you to the project and someone out there can attempt to make and share their own Windows and Linux builds for now. If it doesn’t work for you, I can get back to Paul and I’m sure it can be fixed. I don’t know how he did what he did but I can share it… and he’s also playing with doing the same thing for VCV Rack, and if that pans out I’ll get it to you as quickly as I can, and probably share some explorations with VCV Rack myself while I’m at it, as I’m no neophyte to Eurorack music-making. I can show you the ropes of that… in time.

Give me some time in my cave to heal, and I may let you in when I feel up to it, and I hope I don’t have to apologize for this upcoming year. I can do better than I have been doing. Let me know how Airwindows.clap is treating you, and we can make it grow into something worth having.

Date December 31, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 19 Comments

Chris

Console8Lite

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