Airwindows

MultiBandDistortion

TL;DW: MultiBandDistortion is an old weird gnarly sound wrecker :)

Some plugins just want to watch the world burn :)

I don’t have all that much to say about this one. I’ve been needing to post it: I’ve got folks who ask me for soundgoodizer/OTT type things and try to get a ‘slammed’, deeply unnatural, multiband kind of effect going… and all my life I’ve been learning how to get AWAY from that kind of sonic disassociation and audio gibberish towards stuff with a very different texture. So I’m not a natural match for that kind of thing, and yet I get asked for my take on plugins like that.

So, long ago, I made MultiBandDistortion. I figured if you were going to wreck your sound, let’s REALLY wreck it, and I did some very gnarly things in there that I now don’t entirely understand. I know that if you turn ‘stable’ down, you get a choppy effect not unlike the ZVex Fuzz Factory pedal, only not: the interaction between the bands can get sketchy. Again, I don’t remember how this worked and don’t expect to be revising it or making it more controllable or cleaner: that kind of misses the point. If you’re trying to get a slick version of this kind of thing you start by not using this kind of thing :)

But, it now exists as AU, VST, Linux VST, Win32 and Win64 VST, open source that can be slurped into other people’s projects pretty easily, signed M1 AU and VST… so I’ve done my bit. I’m currently making a lot of progress on more sophisticated filters with coefficient interpolation (some of which are also bonkers, fair warning), and on a revision of my best buss compressor to help me with an album mixing project I’m doing for a favorite local musician, and a really unexpected twist that you’ll see when some new kinds of videos start coming out… but for today, you’ve got a new toy. It’s called MultiBandDistortion. Try not to cut your arm off with it unless you like that sort of thing :)

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 10, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 6 Comments

BiquadPlus

TL;DW: BiquadPlus is Biquad plus zipper noise suppression! For twiddling the controls.

BiquadPlus.zip(597k)

By request, a kind of bugfix!

Understand, a simpler implementation of a biquad filter isn’t a ‘bug’, exactly. I may have not had everything figured out, but if you’re designing fixed filters or looking to tune in EQs on something in your mix, the biquad filters I’ve been making are actually better. Without the extra smoothing code they run more efficiently and eat less CPU, and they’re still useful, plus there’s less to them so they’re more approachable.

But, a lot of musicians seem to enjoy cranking the filters around… and now that I’m using Bespoke all the time, I can put an LFO literally on any damn thing by rightclicking it. And it wasn’t all that difficult to do… I rolled it in to some documentation upgrades I did on the advice of Paul from Surge Synthesizer. One thing about hanging out with the open source music people is, stuff starts happening faster than you could possibly imagine. I had a crash bug in Bespoke on some strange things I needed to build into my main music making procedures, and Ryan had a fix the next MORNING. It’s daunting and wonderful to hang out with these earnest, motivated people.

You’ll see more on that, sooner than you think.

But right now… enjoy a cleaner, smoother Biquad, plus zipper noise suppression! I needed to come up with my Airwindows way to accomplish this, and got it done. More to come.

Oh, and one more thing… on the Airwindows website, on the advice of somebody else, I’ve overhauled the categories and added tags to all the posts. So, there are accurate tags for the plugins that are Nonlinear, that have Ultrasonic Filtering, that do Undersampling, that have Zero Latency (nearly all!) and that use GetSampleRate to try and adjust themselves to different sample rates in the DAW. People have been asking for this and, hundreds and hundreds of edited posts later, the website has tagging that can answer some of your questions without you having to go read the source code :)

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 3, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Ultrasonic Lite (and Medium)

TL;DW: Lighter variations on Ultrasonic

UltrasonicLite.zip(1M)

Hi! This is just what it says on the tin. Airwindows Ultrasonic is the stacked-up, five-biquad filter that rolls off everything above 20k, so in theory it has no sound of its own. It’s there to work in high sample rate mixes, between plugins that have nonlinearities and don’t have their own filtering (some of mine do, like Console7) and it will clean up the top-end of a digital mix.

But, the original Ultrasonic has SO many stages of filtering that it starts to become audible, softening the highs, and if you used lots of them you’d eat your CPU and would be over-processing.

So, enter Ultrasonic Lite (and Ultrasonic Medium).

These are the same sort of thing, except Ultrasonic Lite has only one stage of filtering, and Ultrasonic Medium has two. They also start a teeny bit higher, on the assumption that if you’re reaching for a Lite version of the filter, you’re looking to not hammer your highs too much. Ultrasonic Medium also subtly staggers the placement of its filters so it has a two-stage roll-off that is hopefully more natural sounding than just doubling up Ultrasonic Lite on its own.

Use these just like you would use Ultrasonic, if there are places in your digital mix where you think you’d benefit from suppressing ultrasonic frequencies. These are not brickwalls: the idea here is that you can sprinkle these throughout your mix, anywhere you like, both before and after things that are nonlinear and distorty. For the strongest possible effect, use the original Ultrasonic… but in places where you don’t need that much help with the ultra-highs, try Medium or Lite and apply a cleaner, subtler filter that lets more of the air through.

If you’ve got something that’s causing an aliasing that will give problems further down the mix chain, and you put Ultrasonic Lite in front of it and the aliasing that would’ve bounced back down to 40k is turned down before it even aliases, making that unwanted 40k quieter… and then there’s another Ultrasonic Lite afterwards and that directly turns down the unwanted, aliasing 40k… then you’ve got a gentle, distributed aliasing suppression across your whole mix, that will really control the tendency of aliasing to just build up and go critical on ya :)

The demo is in a sort of DAW-synth-art thing that has just reached its 1.0 release, Bespoke. It’s waaaaay too much fun. Hope ya like it, because I’ll be doing music streams using it. The name of the streams will be the Airwindows Free Studio… because not only is it futuristic and amazing, but between me and my plugins, Bespoke, Surge, the Full Bucket synths, and OBS itself, now you can be on the cutting edge of modern music creation for FREE, absolutely no restriction, plus for most of those you can have the source code and make your own versions.

Some days the world is a very cool place :)

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 September 26, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Tube2

TL;DW: Scrambling to do all the things people talked about :D

Tube2.zip(602k)

Hi again! :D

I took such a beating over TUUUBBEEEE!!!11!! that I’m following up immediately with another version. Not as a replacement, but just pursuing a LOT of the things people were talking about… while retaining some of the bloody-mindedness that makes people so mad at me.

Folks who actually know what they’re talking about had me digging up copies of the RCA Receiving Tube Manual, to study how the electron field’s impedance can fluctuate changing the behavior of preceding stages, and how this is affected by unavoidable time delays as the electrons transit from cathode to plate through grid. (If I have that backwards, please turn your DAW upside down to compensate). There’s good reason to expect second harmonics both on the low end and as higher harmonics: all that’s in there. I did my best to find algorithms that’d sharpen corners going one direction and loosen them going the other. It’s been quite a ride. It did motivate me to code an update to Monitoring that you’ll be seeing pretty soon: adding the ‘Tube used as a safety clipper) tiny pad for appropriate output levels, and switching the new Monitoring to use Dark as its wordlength reducer. You’re hearing all that in the video too.

Most of all: this is the version of Tube that’s pretty close to level matched if you have the input trim at 0.5. You can pad it more if you like. Tube2 still lets you make the audio REALLY BIG, because that’s what it’s for: I needed a safety clipper stage before I needed anything else, and it’s still designed to accurately top out at 0dB exactly, and anything you hit it with from well below to quite a bit above should all sound right.

If you need more gain than you can get from cranking the input pad until it’s wide open, THAT is when you should break out Tube (1) and use it as a feeder for Tube (2). I don’t think there’s much to be gained from running Tube2 into Tube2, though I’m not your Mom and you can do as you like. I’m just saying the whole thing’s designed around finishing up in Tube2, with whatever degree of ‘Tube’ you see fit, and similar behaviors of the control: regardless of what your levels are doing, more TUBE means softer and more saturated distortion, plus all the new behaviors making stuff interesting. When you back off the TUBE control, you’re going for more linearity in every sense, and you should be able to dial in the right vibe without trouble.

I have no idea whether this is gonna get me a fresh new wave of, uh, criticism :) I’m not even sure whether that would be good or whether it’s more likely to be SO good for people that they rush off and use it as intended, don’t find time to get mad, and then the whole thing dies a media death. It is said that scandal drives page views… but my own drives are rather simpler.

I just want to make stuff that sounds good, along the lines I’ve been developing over more than ten years working on getting digital audio to not sound like DAW hell.

This is an upgrade. Hope you like it :)

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 September 19, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 15 Comments

Chris

MultiBandDistortion

BiquadPlus

Ultrasonic Lite (and Medium)

Tube2

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club