Airwindows

Flutter

TL;DW: Flutter is the most recent Airwindows flutter, standalone.

This is by request. Sometimes you want stuff to go a little unsteady and wobbly, but you don’t want a full-on tape emulation with, like, dubly and everything. (you don’t do heavy metal in dubly, you know.) And so, here is Flutter, standalone!

This is a tricky little algorithm, so let me give some details on what’s happening here. It’s not a vibrato, or even particularly random. Flutter gets its rate of waver, from the input signal coming in. This probably means that if you put a test tone in, you get a regular warble… or maybe even some awkward noise… out. The reason it does this is to react to the input waveform more directly. I realize the input waveform doesn’t directly modsulate tape flutter, but this does, so there you go.

In practice, you get a flutter/warble that stays pretty subtle right up to when it doesn’t. Push it far enough and you get aggressive flutter. Dial it back and it quickly becomes more well-behaved, but it’s still functioning and can do a nice job of destabilizing pitch in a tapelike way. A side effect of this quirky approach is that it runs with low enough (but NOT zero) latency that you can use it on a live instrument. You can sneak it onto a delay send, or reverb send, to give yourself just a little spread and layering to what otherwise sounds digitally flat and flawless. Or you can sit it on regular tracks and just go for that very subtle mulch-tone of old school retro, and use other means to dirty the sound up.

Sometimes it’s handy to be able to take something ultra-pure, like a bell or electric piano (or… autotuned vocal?), and destabilize it without any tonal adjustment at all. Retain the chime but add that bit of drift. I hope you like Flutter.

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 December 18, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Baxandall2

TL;DW: Baxandall2 is Baxandall, extended and made more powerful.

Baxandall2.zip(620k)

Sometimes the only way you can make something bigger is to strip it down. I’d been exploring EQs for the purposes of putting one in a future Console version, and revisited Baxandall… well, by the time I was done, a lot was different and a lot was still the same. It still uses my interleaved biquad filters (an unusual choice that helps the shallowness of the filter slopes in this very ‘broad strokes’ EQ). It still uses the technique of sweeping those filter center points to make increasingly extreme effects as you get crazier with it: it gets almost synth-like, starting with general ’tilt EQ’ effects of great subtlety but bringing in wild boosts as you crank it. The purpose of that is to do the sort of anti-Soothe thing I favor: if you have a track and it’s carrying highs, in no way do you need to also have full bass on it. Instead, you build a mix out of composite parts each of which bring a different voicing to the mix. And Baxandall2 is designed to get you to whatever broad EQ place you need, from a place of naturalness.

But there’s nothing natural about the cranked-up 24dB boosts and cuts you can now do. This is newly tuned with the filter sweeping to take you straight past the original Baxandall’s settings into wild new places. Also, the original Baxandall was made more forgiving by running it inside an internal Console processing, analog-ifying it. But it turns out that I can leave that to actual Console versions and strip Baxandall2 down to the guts of it, which actually gave it a lot more power.

This is Baxandall in the form that I will need it, for doing things with. But since it’s Airwindows, you can use it too. And you can still use the original Baxandall, that’s not going anywhere and has its own merits. Baxandall2 is just… more, at any cost, no holds barred. Hope you like it.

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 December 11, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Airwindows Audiophiles

Just to confirm, I used my cellphone number to make a facebook account solely to be able to talk to the Airwindows audiophiles group: my lady friend likes you folks :)

So if you wondered if that was me, consider this authoritative ;)

Date December 8, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

ClipSoftly

TL;DW: ClipSoftly is ClipOnly2 but as a softclipper: a very handy building block.

ClipSoftly.zip(604k)

What more needs be said? ClipSoftly is ultimate softclipping, using the techniques used on ClipOnly2 for softening the edge of the hard clipping, but on the softest possible clipping. Where ClipOnly2 manipulates the onsets of the brightest transients to give you pure hard-clipping without digital grit, ClipSoftly is doing that without even hardclipping.

So what we have here, basically, is a control-less (like ClipOnly and ClipOnly2) safety clipper, but it’s a saturation effect. It’s also a building block I (or others) can use inside larger plugins or new versions of Console, much like the recent Pop2 uses ClipOnly2 on the output, to give you the ability for really aggressive attacks.

You’d use something like ClipOnly2 in mastering specifically because it won’t touch the values of any unclipped samples. ClipSoftly is different: it will touch the values of ALL samples, reshaping the whole sound to make it bigger, fatter, tubier.

I hope you like it, and the way it’ll affect my plugins going forward :)

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 December 4, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 9 Comments

Chris

Flutter

Baxandall2

Airwindows Audiophiles

ClipSoftly

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