Airwindows

ClipOnly2

TL;DW: ClipOnly2 suppresses the brightness of digital clipping without affecting unclipped samples, at any sample rate.

Demonstrated back in Logic, the better to show the no interface! :D

ClipOnly is the heart of my mastering-grade clipping algorithm. Instead of trying to define the cleanest possible nasty sharp edge, or doing a soft-clip thing, ClipOnly passes through ALL nonclipped samples totally untouched… but when you get a clipped sample, what ClipOnly does is it takes the sample entering clipping, and the sample exiting clipping, and it interpolates between the last unclipped sample and the clipped stuff. So, it is synthesizing a soft entry and exit from what is otherwise total hard clipping, and if only the one sample clipped? That very bright clip simply goes away, turned right down.

This produces a hard-clip suitable for safety clipper purposes, which is purely ‘bypass’ (plus a one sample delay to allow for the processing), with softer highs than you’d get from any pure hard-clip, no matter how oversampled. It’s an alternate technique, and is also pretty CPU-efficient.

ClipOnly2 takes this principle and changes the ‘one sample’ to ‘the space of one sample at 44.1k’. Same tone, same ear-friendly approach to clipping extreme highs, except that now it’s effective at high sample rates. I’m demonstrating it and its predecessor at 96k, but ClipOnly2 is designed to work up to 700k or so, in case people get giddy with their newfound power :)

The video works a little oddly as I’m demonstrating it ‘inside’ Console7, on an aux, which is slightly unusual: normally you’d put it in front of the final dither, not gain-staged by BitShiftGain so you can hear it distort hugely. And you can see for yourself that there are no controls: it clips to 0.9549925859 or -0.9549925859 which is about -0.2 dB, and its operation stomps on Gibb Effect Nyquist reconstruction overshoots very heavily, as that’s the whole point of the thing. There’s nothing to adjust. Put it on your mix, and don’t push over -0.2dB and it’ll be pure bypass with no sound at all. If you do peak hotter than that, it’s a brightness-restricted hard clip without ever touching any of the unclipped samples. And now, it handles high sample rates without shifting its glare-restricting ‘voicing’.

All this is supported by my Patreon (linked below). There’s more to come. I would say I’d try to go faster, except I fear my computer would explode :)

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
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 October 31, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 8 Comments

Bespoke Live Drums (and Modular Kicks)

So I’ve just finished this today. It’s for my own use but you can have it too!

Bespoke Live Drums

I’ve put out a series of drumkits, back in the day, and when I started to get into Bespoke I was frustrated not to have as many drum samples. So I started to adapt all my old EXS drumkits to Bespoke format, which basically means ‘take all the instruments and put them in their own folders’. In Bespoke, you select a folder and then you can hit a randomize button and select something out of the folder: you can even trigger an event to continually randomize your groove. If they ever add the ability to pick from the folder based on velocity, the entire library is already ready to work that way.

The old samples are all 24/44.1k, not always super clean: some of ’em had some background noise. In some cases they were mic to mic pre (API) and directly to the converter chips inside an old 20-bit ADAT, ‘cos these date back quite a ways. As a result they can have a lot of impact but signal to noise isn’t ideal: these samples are as raw as I can get them, without processing.

The new ‘Electric’ samples are either Moog or Blue Lantern. DFAM sample sets are from my Moog DFAM, using a FM patch and listening to Osc 2. The Blue Lantern kicks come from three sources. One, an early and hot-rodded Asteroid BD (larger power supply and coupling caps). Two, a newer Asteroid Accented BD, also hot-rodded (new oscillator caps allow for much, much deeper notes). And third, a stock Asteroid Mini Synth, with two other Blue Lantern modules also driving it: the first Asteroid BD (a stock one would do as well) into the Lin input to add FM to the oscillator, and a red Mini Shimmery producing a hihat or click-like sound, that either goes into the Mix input to just be mixed in, or goes into a PCV input as yet another FM modulation. The combination of these Blue Lantern modules made the Electro kicks, with their super-aggressive attacks. There’s a youtube video documenting how I selected the Electro kicks from out of a thirty minute long sampling session, here. All the Electric kicks were picked out this way, but only the Electro ones got a livestream :)

Hope you like these samples!

Date October 25, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

YHighpass

TL;DW: YHighpass is soft and smooth to nasty, edgy texture-varying filtering.

YHighpass.zip(612k)

See YLowpass, except it’s a highpass :) but there are several ‘one more things’, most notably an upgrade to what I’ve been using for denormalization. I ran into issues with YLowpass munching too much CPU. The fixes I came up with, worked so well, that I’ve applied them to Console7, Console7Cascade, Chamber, Galactic, and several plugins that haven’t come out yet :) As a result, my previous video using YLowpass crept up to 70% CPU at times, and this video using the exact same setup and plugins idles around 35%. I call that a good day (OK, week) of work.

I’m also showing off (in the video) the Beyer mic I got: not because I’ll be switching to that for plugin videos, but because I’m showing you how to record two mics in stereo (one of them a very clean and accurate lavalier mic) and then develop plugins to make the cleaner, more accurate mic act more like the far more expensive and flattering mic. It’s not unlike making Mackity, or something. I’ll be doing this on a Monday livestream once I make the reference files: this is how you’d make those, and where you’d put the mics.

Hope you like YHighpass: once I’m finished with these, I revisit the Z plugins (meant to sound like Emu Z-plane filters from a hardware sampler) bringing these refinements to ’em. Also spotted in the ‘coming soon’ category, Pressure5 and Monitoring2 (with Dark as the base wordlength reducer), and a whole bunch of drum samples I’ve reconfigured for use in Bespoke.

To get the new versions of Console7Channel, Console7Buss, Console7Cascade, Chamber, Galactic, and YLowpass that have the denormalization upgrade, re-install them from the download links below. If for some reason you need to put back the original ones, they can be downloaded from the plugins’ individual webpages: there’s a link for each at the bottom of the post, saying ‘download the original version before the fix here: pluginFirst.zip’. You shouldn’t need to do that but just in case I like to leave the exact original files still there to be downloaded, in case anyone actually needed to :)

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
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 October 24, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

YLowpass

TL;DW: YLowpass is soft and smooth to nasty, edgy texture-varying filtering.

YLowpass.zip(613k)

Introducing the Y filters! Where the X filters were eXperimental and the Z filters are emulations meant to sound like hardware, YLowpass is further researches before going back into the Z filters for refinements. I’m using these to perfect the designs, and YLowpass is an important step in doing that.

It’s got interpolated coefficients on everything, reducing zipper noise. And double ultrasonic filtering. But it’s got a lot more than that: YLowpass introduces a new way to internally distort filters, and a new control… Resonant Edge! The ‘normal’ position for this is around 0.1 on the control. If you make it less, you get a slightly asymmetrical distortion that lets you get really warm analog filter sounds, even when they’re resonant. I stacked a couple of these up in the video to get Alpha Juno saturated filter sounds, that being one of my favorite analog synths, and I demonstrate it directly against the real authentic Alpha Juno run into the computer using API pres for input gain, an unmistakably analog tone. YLowpass holds up pretty well under that scrutiny. And then, I bring in a drum breakbeat, and start showing off how crazy YLowpass can get. The Resonant Edge lets you go to very aggressive, glitchy sounds that are a lot more like circuit bending than bit-banging.

I’ll be doing further Y series, and as I go I’ll be trying to refine the set every step of the way. For instance, in Bespoke I was getting some CPU issues (eagle-eyed viewers can see the CPU meter) since the Y filters will be rather heavy on the CPU. I’ve got some ideas for addressing this through adding an analog noise floor factor that could become part of Airwindows plugins as a general thing: experimentation will tell me the answers. (note: I’ve now updated it to help that: original file is at YLowpassFirst.zip(612k)

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
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 October 17, 2021
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Chris

ClipOnly2

Bespoke Live Drums (and Modular Kicks)

YHighpass

YLowpass

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club