Airwindows

FireAmp

TL;DW: FireAmp is a bright, loud, tubey amp sim for leads and dirt guitar.

Hi! Still taking in the incredibly long days way high up in British Columbia, Canada, and though I’m still struggling to get my work done (late posting again, and a woefully out of focus video: better next time!) I do have a plugin.

And it’s a guitar plugin… and though I can’t have a guitar up here, I cobbled together a bit of madness in the tracker program Renoise, mixed it in Reaper, and I’ve got a guitar-driven track that’s stranger than any human would actually play. Bodes well for the ability to do interesting stuff up here… or indeed for anyone on a laptop with a bunch of programs and plugins! I’m still looking forward to having real guitars though :)

FireAmp’s the first in a set of old/new plugins I’m doing. They’re the opposite of your usual guitar plugin arsenal: no multi-effects, no squishy thick tone color, barely even settings. FireAmp is ONE tone, that aligns with some kinds of things I like to do with guitars. It sits in the mix like a classic rock track: you’re hearing it with a set of retro tones that blend with FireAmp (in fact, the bass is a Rickenbacker, and the neck pickup’s through another upcoming Airwindows amp sim but the bridge pickup is also through FireAmp).

If you want to get freaky with it and want a tone stack, you might try putting ZNotch in front of it, or MackEQ… your tone stack doesn’t HAVE to be part of the amp sim plugin. Just sayin’.

It runs zero latency so you can track through it. It’s loud, bright and sonorous, raw as hell, high impact, no gloss or glitz. Even if it’s not your pet sound you might find a use for FireAmp on layered guitars or other sounds… and unlike the original, it has undersampled FireCab built in for its matched tone, and it has a sophisticated dry/wet control that begins giving you raw amp AND raw signal to provide a range of more open tonalities through the high gain amp sim madness. This makes it an interesting choice for dirtying up non-guitar signals: the dry/wet will let you tailor that in interesting ways.

I hope you like it. There’s more to come, all of them just as quirky and one-trick pony as FireAmp. Back in the day, I liked to alternate real miked guitar amp usage, with stuff like the Rockman, to get different textures. FireAmp is one such different texture, and you never can tell when it might be useful :)

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 April 25, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

PurestWarm2

TL;DW: PurestWarm2 adds dual dry/wet controls for each side of the waveform.

PurestWarm2.zip(613k)

Hi! Sorry for the slight delay: I just flew over 2000 miles and everything’s been a bit up in the air, not just me being up in the air. But I’m here! And I have a plugin, by request.

The plugin’s actually the most normal thing here. It’s PurestWarm, but better. I was asked for a version of PurestWarm with a dry/wet (which would make it even more subtle and gentle) and then I thought, why not TWO dry/wets, one for either side of the waveform? That way you could massage both the positive and negative sides of the wave (seen briefly in the video: I wiggle the cursor around to show which side’s being reined in by which slider) to taste, or both at once.

And so that’s what PurestWarm2 is (plus, ultrasonic filtering added for use at high sample rates). It’s also using a performance tweak I hit on, defining the filter coefficients when the plugin’s instantiated, rather than once every sample buffer. Not a complicated thing, but for anyone who made use of PurestWarm, this should count as a nice upgrade. And it’s a direct request: since I was asked for PurestWarm but with a dry/wet, how could I not?

The video I’ve made will look SUPER different. This is me in British Columbia, way the heck up in Canada away from everything. Even getting decent internet’s been tricky. But it’s also me trying out new things, and learning to make proper videos and not just grab the output of OBS and call it a day. There’ll be more… one of the things I did before putting all my home stuff in storage, was capture a bunch of great vinyl records with an eye to making Evergreens again. If all goes well I can make and upload some of those while I’m still up in Canada… plus, I’ve got a batch of plugins ready to go, including the amp sims people have been asking for.

If you’re wondering… the little montage at the end is a glimpse of my life here in Canada. The kitty’s one of several who live here, and my lap is totally covered in cat hair (it’s been years since I lost my last pet cat to old age, so there’s something I’d been missing). The town’s a little oil town in Canada and we’re not going to be staying, but here we are for now: and the baked goods and eggs are Ukrainian Easter tradition, all by my lady love, who’s of Ukrainian and Indigenous heritage. And yes, it tastes as good as it looks :)

Enjoy the plugin, and be patient as I teach myself Final Cut Pro and learn to make videos properly. And I hope you like what I’ll have in weeks to come :)

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 PurestWarm2original.zip(613k)

Date April 18, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

StereoEnsemble

TL;DW: StereoEnsemble is a sort of hyperchorus blast from the past.

StereoEnsemble.zip(622k)

Please forgive my bad video making: I’m trying to keep on having plugins to post, though my life is bad right now. StereoEnsemble is a blast from the past, updated with modern dithering to floating point and undersampling: bottom line is, this is a plugin that can take either a mono or a stereo input and give you a bunch of additional ensemble-y goodness, with particular attention to simulating stereo imaging through staggered delay pairs (making stuff be panned interestingly through adding echoes that have time offsets between left and right channels).

I’ll be bringing out other classic stereo FX too, and quite a lot else. (I’ll also be trying to get a handle on my video making again: more to be revealed about what’s going on right now, but for now please bear with me). I’ve got the guitar amp plugins people were wanting (as usual, some people will really like them and others will freak out and hate them, so… yay? Anyway they’re not like anything else you’ve got)

Next time you see me you might be a bit surprised at where I ended up…

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 April 10, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Airwindows Starter Kit 2022

StarterKit.zip(6.4M)

A year ago, I put together a collection of the plugins most likely to be useful for people starting out. Now it’s 2022, and half the plugins in that collection have had new versions, and I’ve ported everything to Raspberry Pi, and I’ve ported everything to signed Mac AU and VST for the Apple Silicon Processors, NONE of which was the case at this time in 2021.

So it was time to update Starter Kit, and that I have done. You’ll find the following plugins: Baxandall, Capacitor2, Channel9, ClipOnly2, Console7Buss, Console7Cascade, Console7Channel, DeBess, Focus, Galactic, Hypersonic, Interstage, Monitoring, Pressure5, PurestGain, Srsly2, and Verbity.

All these of course are in the big plugin collections, but when I put out Texturize new people showed up who didn’t know Airwindows and asked ‘oh hey, nice, does he have anything else I should know about?’

HOO BOY :D

So, Airwindows Starter Kit 2022 is the answer to that question. There’s a readme file in the zip that outlines what’s there, and I’ve made an hourlong video in Reaper (the DAW that’s on ALL the platforms I port to) which ‘does a mix using the plugins’ which really means, demonstrates every one and where it should go, without following up and doing an actual MIX mix because I just plain ran out of time, it would have been several hours if I’d done that. Still, it tells you what goes where (and is also a first tentative step into something I’ve been planning, putting stuff together in Final Cut and not just doing it all live in OBS)

So if you’re new, I know the full nearly-300 deep pile of plugins is too much. I’ll keep Starter Kit up to date, and this is ‘the core’ as it currently stands. I realized when I looked back at it, that if I updated it and added Srsly2 (possibly Chamber in the place of Verbity, you can try that as well) I would have what I personally used for mixing. And that seemed a good enough reason to revisit the Starter Kit. Ya gotta start somewhere! :)

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 April 4, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Chris

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