Airwindows

YLowpass

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

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

MultiBandDistortion

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

MultiBandDistortion.zip(610k)

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

Chris

YLowpass

MultiBandDistortion

BiquadPlus

Ultrasonic Lite (and Medium)

handsewn bespoke digital audio

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The Last Year

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