Airwindows

DubSub2

TL;DW: DubSub2 is the essence of the Airwindows head bump.

DubSub2 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Bass’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
DubSub2.zip(505k) standalone(AU, VST2)

The final element for reinventing ToTape is in place, with DubSub2!

I’ve always used this one particular algorithm, both for ToTape and for various bass-emphasis plugins. It acts like a combination between an IIR filter and a saturation. And it’s got fantastic sound, but with a catch: it has to be controlled in the higher frequencies or it’ll sound growly and distorted if you push it, and it’s unstable.

That’s literal. I have to do stuff to control it or it will throw bass so hard that it sits around pushing DC. The algorithm has to be filtered because it’s unstable, it’ll constantly bring up deep bass no matter what. The sound of it is intrinsically tied to this behavior.

So, what if I tried the technique I use in Parametric, and set up some biquad filters as bandpasses, and then stack them (slightly staggered, for tone purposes) to get better rejection of unwanted DC energy? What could go wrong? Well… it’s tricky. If you do that, phase shifts will cause there to be a cancellation around the bandpass frequency. You’ll get notches, the placement depending on what your filter bandwidth is.

But hang on. Jack Endino’s got a webpage where he’s measured lots of real analog tape machines, showing the head bumps. And the thing is, on his measurements there’s consistently a notch there, too. It’s exactly an octave above the head bump, and that’s part of the sound.

So what’s the bandpass resonance, when you’re using two of them stacked, and then you want the notch produced by the phase shifting (already an unusual choice) to line up exactly an octave over the head bump resonance, so that your DubSub2 head bump will consistently behave like the real thing? You can set the head bump frequency to whatever you like (Jack finds that doubling the track width halves the head bump frequency, and of course going from 15 ips to 30 ips doubles the head bump frequency, and the notch stays exactly an octave higher). But the Q is what positions that notch. Since there is clearly no correct value for such a bizarre experiment, since super-shallow Q won’t work, since using Butterworth (0.7071) is slightly too tight… what’s the resonance number for the two stacked bandpasses?

The golden ratio.

…hope you enjoy DubSub2, and this is what will become the head bump for ToTape7 :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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 August 4, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Dubly2

TL;DW: Dubly2 is a key part of seventies sonics!

Dubly2 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Effects’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Dubly2.zip(513k) standalone(AU, VST2)

As we race towards ToTape7, more of the component parts emerge as their own plugins! As long as I’m reinventing all the things that go into ToTape7 (I’ve seen people get excited about the previous plugin, ToTape6, and felt I could do a heck of a lot better now) I like to let people have the new stuff immediately, and I like to let people use the component parts of things. So, first Flutter2 gets lifted to a new level, and now, Dubly2 is yours!

And where Flutter2 took the basic algorithm to a new level, Dubly2 hasn’t changed the basic sound of the plugin very much (it DOES change, especially if you’re slamming it with volume). Instead… it’s the control you get… which goes from a 2022-Chris ‘one knob simplification’ design, to six knobs and a dry/wet. Normally, nearly all of those would be preset, or perhaps would be trimpots inside the noise reduction box. Dubly’s sound dates back to the late (or even mid) 1960s, and of course the 1970s, and the noise reduction machines were sold to big studios.

So, unlike modern noise reductions where the system’s very specific and detailed and is a black box you can’t mess with… Dubly is kicking it old school! You can leave the encode and decode controls set to 0.5 for a ‘normal’ sound, or you can mess with them. The algorithms are very simple for better tone quality, but the end result is very Dubly!

Encode has an encode level, and a frequency control. This specifies the ‘brightness band’ you’ll be using and compressing 2:1 to get the brightness boost that gets added to the audio. It’s pretty straightforward.

Decode has a decode level, and a frequency control. This (and it’s the same on the old units, believe it or not) does exactly the same encode, the same way… except you add it phase-inverted. That’s it: that’s Dubly. You can look up on old schematics, exactly where the output of the elaborate filtering and compression stuff is routed to one spot on the circuit board for ‘encode’ and another spot for ‘decode’.

This does have some implications. The highs get squished twice. In real units, care is taken to not have the compression time constants ‘breathe’ weirdly: for Dubly, we just use uLaw encoding on a brightness-filtered sound and it works great. It produces a similar effect when you add small amounts to the source audio.

If you’re going to mess with the trimpots (now ordinary sliders for anybody to play with), you can get controllable amounts of the ‘two noise reduction units in encode, in series’ simply by turning up the Encode amount. The existing processing becomes a special ‘gloss and sparkle’ control. You can tweak the Decode Amount similarly. The frequencies can be nudged up or down together, or you can make them be slightly different frequencies for unusual midrange effects that aren’t normal: letting more mids through on Encode will cause them to be more compressed and intense, or you could go the other way and slim them down a little for an ‘expanded’ feel. It’s all rather subtle but it’s also tonal characteristics that really can’t be had any other way… and if I’m not mistaken, these little adjustments can ‘dial in’ on the sound of many classic, beloved records.

I look forward to playing with all this in the full ToTape7, with flutter and tape bias modeling, but for now you can fully play with and get used to these qualities in advance! Have fun with Dubly2 :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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 28, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

Flutter2

TL;DW: Flutter2 is the flutter from ToTape7, standalone.

Flutter2 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Lo-Fi’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Flutter2.zip(504k) standalone(AU, VST2)

It’s time for a new ToTape (actively being worked on, and yes you’re still getting more reverbs and ConsoleX and all that) and it turns out that when I went back in to revise the tape flutter algorithm, live on stream, the work went so well that I COULD NOT WAIT. I was basically looking to address how, in the original Flutter, it slows as well as becoming gentler when you turn it down, and I thought that for 2024 ToTape7 it might be worth bringing in extra controls just to give people more power over their flutter effect.

And then when I improved the algorithm and discovered that, cranked up, it does everything from shortwave radio impressions to Cookie Monsterification, that was exciting.

But not as exciting as when I learned that if you crank it way up and make the flutterspeed REALLY slow, you get a heavy guitar doubler. Suddenly, I had a really decent fake hard-panned, still weirdly tight, doubled guitar that sounded fantastic apart from occasionally (and understandably) going mono on me.

Enjoy Flutter2, it’s going to be in the new ToTape7 when that’s done. It means you have everything from reel-to-reel (less flutter than 0.5 for that), to cassette, to Roland Space Echo, to VHS, to cassette that’s been yanked out of the shell and jumped up and down on for a bit and put back and attempted to be played.

Also, here’s my tip: rather than track one guitar and try to make it two with Flutter2, have you considered tracking three guitars and trying to make it five? If you do two real doubletracks, and then one ‘thickener’ to put in the center, and THEN add Flutter2 to that center track and use the dry/wet control, you can very definitely mimic FIVE guitar tracks for the price of three, and if center/flutter2 is slightly quieter it won’t stick out that much when Flutter starts to hint at mono occasionally, because there’s meant to be a mono track. You can lean on the Flutter2 a bit harder if you want to go superwide.

Oh, which reminds me, there’s also a new Srsly coming… but more on that later. Enjoy Flutter2 :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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 21, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

kCathedral3

TL;DW: kCathedral3 is a giant cathedral-like space using Bezier undersampling.

kCathedral3 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
kCathedral3.zip(614k) standalone(AU, VST2)

From the mad scientist’s lab, bigtime!

This is the third kCathedral, and probably the final one before I launch into lots of other types of reverbs. I’ve got three lined up already, but this is where I figure out what the kReverbs are about.

The first one was like this: one knob, dry/wet (a ‘wetness’ knob, in that the center is full volume for both) and a 5×5 Householder matrix. Put it out, people had fun but it was kind of metallic. Not really ready. So I kept working.

The second one was one knob, dry/wet as before, greatly improved sonics. I designed new ways to generate and test the reverb algorithms, churned through millions of possibilities, measured and tested and cooked up a new and unique Cathedral algorithm. Also, tried a different sort of early reflections. Still a one-knob, but sounded a lot better.

Then… I did even more algorithm testing. And invented CrunchCoat. And then DeRez3. And then CreamCoat, a method for using that technique while keeping the downsample ‘gears’ from seeming unrealistic. And explored the usefulness of varying regeneration. And found that when varying downsampling it’s useful to adjust regen. And discovered Discontinuity! And tried using it in the feedback loop of the reverb, to dial in realistic huge-space sustain at synthetic loudnesses.

So basically this ought to work for the genre going forward. If you thought CreamCoat sounded cool, that’s the very primitive version compared with this, still a 5×5 Householder (already an unusual choice) but this time selected from more millions of options with new metrics for analyzing them. This time there’s a predelay, a Discontinuity (says Top dB), a wide ranging Regen control (for realistic RT60s: this one happens to not go infinite). And that DeRez control you saw on CreamCoat, but this time it’s on a BIG reverb.

I feel this ought to work really well for many purposes: just listen to it. It’s still trying to be an Airwindows-style reverb rather than ‘front and center instrument for making all possible sounds’, but within the context of cathedral-style deep verb, I think this obliterates the first two AND completely abandons the ‘over-simplified’ thing I tried valiantly to make work.

Hope you like it, let me know what you think.

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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 14, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Chris

DubSub2

Dubly2

Flutter2

kCathedral3

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club