Airwindows

Shape

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

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

Console 8

TL;DW: Console8 moves to a channel/submix/buss topology and adds analog simulation.

Console8.zip(4M)

Yep. Told you I had stuff in the works! ;)

These are subtle things, not meant to be wildly wildly more colored and different from regular digital mix buss. It’s not like an amp sim. BUT, all the same, if you start to seriously listen to the texture and depth and how stuff communicates through Console8 relative to even Console7 much less a straight DAW mix, Console8 pretty much obliterates the rest. I made it because I needed it. I’m going to be using it, lots, and you can use it too: my plugins and digital things are free, Patreon-supported. These are tough times but that’s still working and has become all the more important to commit to.

But what makes Console8 that much better?

Ultrasonic filtering at 24k, distributed among more stages than ever before in a Console version, for extended highs (and it switches off at lower sample rates when it wouldn’t be helping, for lower CPU and more direct sound)

Distributed highpass filtering emulating real analog gear. This is a new filter that doesn’t exist anywhere else and is only part of Console8. It’s more a texture/attitude filter than a sound-shaping filter, and is quite low but its effect is strongly felt.

Distributed, gradiated treble softening across the whole mix topology. The idea is that your inputs are clean and low level, and as we go deeper into the console the levels rise as does the energy level, until the final mix buss is very powerful and pushing any electronics, transformers etc. quite hard. This gives Console8 the ability to do airy subtle sparkle and big roaring powerful energy all at the same time. It should just naturally happen through appropriate mixing. Think big, grand scale.

A new mix topology with much simpler rules for how to set it up, using six dedicated plugins in six places.

ChannelIn, SubIn, and BussIn go FIRST on your channels, submixes, and master buss.
ChannelOut, SubOut, and BussOut go LAST on your channels, submixes, and master buss.
All channels must go to a Submix with unity gain between the Out plugins and the In plugin on the submix.
All submixes must go to the Master Buss with unity gain between the Out plugins and the In plugin on the master buss.
The output of the BussOut goes directly to your converter, your file etc. and you’re done :)

I realize this is a lot to take in but in practice it should all just work and fall into place very naturally. The Out plugins all have faders, which are good to assign to midi controllers so you can adjust them with physical controls and not the mouse. I have mine working with a TX-6 :) They’re designed so that 0.5 is unity: less than that fades down to zero, and more than that gives you about 12dB of boost in each stage. That’s also true for the master buss, except it also drives into the ClipOnly2 so it gets a punchier ‘slam’ than the channels and submixes get if you push those.

It’s not really intended for ‘everything is louder than everything else’ overloudenated nonsense but will probably do that better than anything else you can have, especially if you’re trying to get a grand scale on things and not just ear-maiming grit :)

Again, ‘In’ goes first. ‘Out’ goes last. All Channels go to a Sub, all Subs go to the Buss, and you’re done. Easy to explain :)

I may or may not get back to my regular posting and/or streaming routine but I’m inspired and have more great stuff coming so it should be good. More on that when it actually comes out: you know I’m full of surprises. Please do join the Patreon if you’re sure that you can, we gotta stick together and I’ll pull my weight. Console8 should still count as ‘one plugin’ unless you really feel you should support it as if it were worth six :)

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 Console8original.zip(4M)

Date June 14, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 22 Comments

Chris

Shape

Console8Hype

Hype

Console 8

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club