Airwindows

LilAmp

TL;DW: LilAmp is a tiny amp sim, like a little bitty practice amp without that much gain.

Here’s a cute little monster for you! LilAmp is an alternate take on my amp sims (resurrected from way back when, and brought up to speed to some extent). Unlike something like FireAmp or GrindAmp, this one’s much lower gain and acts like little practice amps, but the kind with a lot of loudness and sonority.

You use this when you want more of a clean, articulate effect, or when you’re trying to highlight the treble and midrange (for instance, for leads, or to turn a snare into a loud, confined whack). You can make it be more mellow, too, but it will always be ‘LilAmp’ and speak up in a certain way. Something I found it useful for, is rhythm guitar that’s kind of Stonesy and not all that saturated: you can get the right kind of midrange bark out of it.

All these amp sims (there are more coming, too!) incorporate the cab sim stuff I’d also done back in the day, and they all have a rather special dry/wet control where backing off the full-wet sound gives you two stages of dry/wet, one for the cab sim and one for the amp sim. So things clean up in a distinctive way that’s not like any other plugin, or anything you could get out of a real amp, for that matter. Treat LilAmp as a flexible way to get this type of sound, because it’s way more interested in doing that, than in trying to mimic any particular literal amp. Rather than taking a real amp and EQing and shaping it to your mix, you take LilAmp and morph it directly until it does what’s needed (this applies to the other Airwindows amp sim plugins, too).

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 July 11, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Shape

TL;DW: Shape is an asymmetrical waveshaper for peak manipulating.

Shape.zip(622k)

Here’s a really basic building block for ya. The key word here is asymmetrical.

Shape is a simple, often subtle, little plugin for either pulling out, or squishing in, parts of the waveform. It’s based on the same basic technology as Console: complementary sin() and asin() functions. But in Shape, you’re picking which you want to apply, and you’re offsetting things so you can hit one side of the waveform more than the other.

Works like this. The Shape control determines what you’re doing. In the middle (0.5) you’re not doing anything. Increase it to 1.0 and you are stretching out the peaks of the waveform. Turn it down to 0.0 and you’re squishing the peaks of the waveform: like a soft-saturation but no boost, just restricting the waveform and making it distorted. The control scales all this so if you’re not cranking it out, you have lots of headroom and very gentle effects.

The Offset control interacts with this by shifting things from one side to the other: 0.5 is no offset, 0.0 is negative and 1.0 is positive (in my sound editor in the video, this is the top half of the waveform as positive). The effect of this, especially if you’ve not cranked out the Shape control, is to make the Shape control do its thing to only one side of the wave. You shouldn’t automatically crank this one out either: you can, for nasty waveshaping tricks, but the power of Shape is in how transparently it can manage the positive and negative swings of your waveform.

Also, when we’re reshaping the waveform so asymmetrically, that’s built-in even harmonics: this is a recipe for warmth. It’s like a turbo version of my PurestWarm plugins but even smoother, or like a variation of my SingleEndedTriode plugin. Use it gracefully (not cranking out the controls all the way) and everything you do will be tonal adjustments of great purity and subtlety, which is why it can be a bit hard to hear its effect when the controls are very near the middle.

So the trick is to know what way you’re using it. If you’re doing sound design and you’re trying to get a sound to swing fully in both directions, you can either pick the part that you think is swinging too far (pos or neg), set the offset to favor that, and pull back that side by setting Shape lower than halfway (cutting BACK the side you’re focussing on), or you can pick the side that doesn’t go far enough, set the offset to favor it, and turn Shape UP to bring that side’s peaks up to match the other side.

Or if you’re working on a bass and want it to be warmer, you can just choose between more Shape (more of a triangle-ey result out of a sine input) or less Shape (more of a squared result out of a sine input) and then lean the Offset one way or the other to get the warmth you want (not all the way, or it won’t be as smooth).

Or, you can take your bass that you want to be purer, and try to identify whether it’s too triangle-ey or too square-ey, and then apply Shape to nudge it more in the direction of a pure sine-ey tone. It’s a waveshaper, so you can stack them up to get a VERY soft square or a soft-pointed triangle out of any sine-bass you start with, or put ’em back to the sine shape, or lean the offset one way or another, all very transparently.

I don’t know how clear all this is, because you probably don’t have this function laid out in this way, and it’s too subtle for normal plugin makers to be able to sell you. Any commercial plugin where turning it up doesn’t equal ‘more’ plus you can’t always hear what it does, is in big trouble. But I’m Patreon-supported so I don’t have to follow those rules, so I can give you Shape even if most people don’t get a big charge out of it and throw their money :)

And so I have. Enjoy Shape. My hope is that it serves its useful purpose for those who need to tweak exactly this, as transparently as possible. And if you didn’t need to… maybe you just didn’t know it was a thing. It is now! :)

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.

The original version, which didn’t apply the ultrasonic filtering on VSTs, is at Shapeoriginal.zip(622k)

Date July 4, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Console8Hype

TL;DW: Console8Hype swaps out just the In sections of Console8, for a brighter sparklier circuit.

Console8Hype.zip(2M)

The original Console8 had a treble soften that was too weird to let people have. Used in every stage, it shaped the sound plenty, but it let through this weird airy brightness and hyper-focus that was far too extreme to have as the base Console sound. I tried reining it in with a dry/wet and that only created bizarre cancellations and other problems, and so I dug deeper and came up with a treble softening that played better at widely varying audio levels and gave the impact and solidity I needed. And the weird airy first version was gone forever.

Here it is :)

Here’s what you need to know: the plugins Console8ChannelHype, Console8SubHype, and Console8BussHype have no controls, and you can swap them out with Console8ChannelIn, Console8SubIn, and Console8BussIn. Those are the plugins that have the treble softening at each stage, and those are the ones you replace. The more stages you replace, the more hyped and trebly the result will be: maybe not to the extent of taking an EQ and cranking it, but the whole tonality is different. The In plugins have a solidness, more tough-sounding and physical: the Hype plugins are softer, more ethereal. They’re still manipulating the sound and are actually softening high-mids and treble, but the presence band is sticking out.

Treat them like they’re preamp modules with a different circuit and its own sound, which you can use in three places on the resulting console. You can have them on individual channels for the most direct effect, or on the submixes where they’ll change the tone of the whole sub, or on the buss to take the entire mix and hype it in this way. If you’ve got a sound going through two or more stages of hype, it’ll be more obvious, and using it on later stages will tend to change the shape and color of the mix as a whole, not just the individual sounds.

I can’t tell you how to incorporate these: it’s too Airwindowsy for that. Console8 is the latest Console made more direct with simpler, more obvious rules, but it doesn’t tell you how to mix, and when you include the Console8Hype plugins it becomes very difficult to explain what swapping them in will do. It depends on what your mix is, what you’re trying to do with it, and it’s heavily about textural values like solidness versus ethereal spaceyness, physical versus abstract, hard versus soft, not stuff you can just boil down to frequencies and DB values. It means direct access to tone options that are distinctly different, and applying them to not only sounds but the way the mix comes together. Hype on an individual track versus Hype on the buss are the same amount of ‘hype’, but totally different things in the final mix, and I can’t tell you which are going to be better for you.

So I won’t. Console8Hype is your secret weapon and where you incorporate it is your affair: even other people knowing about Console8 might not hit upon the way you integrate Hype stages into the mix. This post may well drop out of sight quickly as Console8Hype is another layer of tricky on top of the already demanding Console8… and that’s fine. I’ll be using it, and I’ll answer questions about it, but not everybody needs to ‘get’ this.

Regarding the video, I’m happy to say that while there are indeed russian hackers trying to pwn my site (it’s the internet, after all) I think I’ve sorted out the problems over the last couple days. It wasn’t enemy action, it was something randomly breaking for no reason that used to be working, and now for some reason it changed, and I made adjustments and things should be good.

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.

Console8Hypeoriginal.zip(2M)

Date June 27, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 6 Comments

Hype

TL;DW: Hype is a treble softening experiment gone strangely awry :)

Hype.zip(603k)

I may have mentioned that Console8 attempted a treble softening thing that went terribly wrong and acted like an aural exciter?

This is it :)

No controls, and in fact it fought my attempts to add any. If you use external controls, for instance the dry/wet you can get in Reaper, it will not behave nicely and will do weird things at intermediate settings. I have no idea what will happen if you try and oversample it: it, and you, may die, so you have been warned. This is the Airwindows experiment that went TOO weird to use as the treble softening in Console8, which is already pushing the limits of reasonableness in certain ways.

Can’t even describe this, just drop it into your mix anywhere and see what it does. It’s like it tries to do a treble soften, but doesn’t get the concept entirely. In the video I made, you can see that stacking about six to eight of these up gets you into obvious distorted crackling territory. The original use in Console8 had three of these stacked, and I knew there was trouble when instead of softening the tone subtly and nicely, it was like a light turned on inside things. Don’t stack up too many of them if you want things to be more reasonable.

I also can’t blend between this and the final Console8 treble softening. Nor am I interested in adding a switch so all Console8 (‘in’ plugs) have this, it’s just too eccentric, more like what Console7Cascade was, except Console8 now leans a little bit in the direction of what Console7Cascade was. That said, simply adding this to Console8 doesn’t replicate what the original experiment did, this is just that part of it stripped out and isolated in a sort of featureless plugin test-tube so you can play with the effect all by itself.

Let me know what you think, we may not be quite done with this one. Or if you’re like ‘yeah this is hot garbage, bin it’ that is cool too :)

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 June 24, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Chris

LilAmp

Shape

Console8Hype

Hype

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club