Airwindows

ZHighpass

TL;DW: ZHighpass is a highpass made to sound and act like the Emu e6400 Ultra highpass.

And here… we… go!

I picked the highpass to attempt first off the e6400 because it’s way harder. In recordings of the real unit, if you overdrive the samples you can hear how the machine flips out when you sweep the highpass up real high. Part of this is from the output stages of the device having characteristics not unlike Mackity: you get a strange overshoot, and that’s from the hardware.

These are not exactly ’emulations’ in the sense of stealing all the code out of the 6400 and then modeling the entire circuit and basically jacking the whole thing. That’s not what I do, and that stuff always ends up sounding very plastic to my ear (way too much overprocessing to try and get the fiddly details the same: you end up with a clone, but soulless)

Instead, ZHighpass is first in a series of Z-plugins, building on what I learned with the X series, and designed to act and respond the same as the real deal, but in the box. I got as close as I could with my own techniques, using some details (like where the filters hard-clip, and the likely Q factors) to zero in further. My hope is not as much that I’ve perfectly duplicated every detail of the hardware device… but that I made a plugin with enough of the soul of that device, that you can get equally musical results out of it. You should be able to USE ZHighpass much the way you’d use the real sampler and its genuine Z-Plane filters, to get filter swoops and voicings that deliver as much of the aggressive mojo you’d enjoy from the real thing.

Except that you can take it a little bit farther, and adjust it in ways not available on the real-deal sampler, to your taste. ‘Cos we’re not here just to clone what DnB maestros did in the Nineties. We’re playing with this particular sampler and mimicking some of its tricks because it turns out that was an amazing-sounding instrument, that gave you stuff typical DAW EQs don’t even come close to offering. And now, with ZHighpass, you can easily turn your DAW into that kind of instrument, on as many tracks as you like, anytime and anywhere you like.

And the cooling fan’s (probably) way quieter. And it’s easier to patch. Props to the real e6400 Ultra, though. You’ll be hearing more from that, in upcoming weeks.

(I updated this plugin to have more output gain: if you need the original one just the way it went out, it’s here at ZHighpassOriginal.zip(620k)

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 August 15, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

PitchDelay

TL;DW: PitchDelay is TapeDelay2 but with pitch shift instead of flutter.

PitchDelay.zip(622k)

So I was at a a synthesizer meet-up talking with some folks and someone asked me if I could do a particular thing. I’d mentioned how my TapeDelay2, which I was about to post that very night, would let you wiggle around the speed control and you’d get crazy wobble JUST like if you were doing it on a tape deck, because of the way I ran the delay buffers. And the request was to make a plugin where the time would wobble but the pitch would not, perhaps using some pitch shifter algorithm.

And… I did not make that thing! :D but I made this instead, and here you go!

All this is, is TapeDelay2 but instead of the flutter control, it’s got a fixed pitch shift. It’s being done in a more normal way than Glitch Shifter, but for all that it still enables some silly and extreme noises. Everything not flutter/pitch knob related, is exactly the same: all my development time went towards making the pitch shift interesting.

If you shift up, you can go towards very shrill crazy up-shifts that are right to the edge of blowing up the plugin. If you shift down, you can drop pitch down to literally nothing… and then keep going until you’re doing reverse buffer looping, which ends up (at a setting of 0) being the same pitch you started with, but backwards. Except it’s not playing the actual audio backwards, it’s cycling the algorithm backwards while the sound still plays ‘forwards’, so you get a ‘voice disguise’ effect. Sneak the setting just off the zero point, and it’s backwards low-speed, good for alien monster voices. If you include the regeneration while doing this you get a glorious mess. Also, the regeneration can be set to WAY more than just feedback, but it subtly restrains itself a bit so that you can hover around total feedback in a usable way. This combined with pitch shifting settings and the filter that comes with TapeDelay2 can give you a whole pile of strange, sorta-analogy noises without even putting more sounds in (it does require some sort of noise beyond digital black to start with, but once it’s going you’ll be able to play it like a weird instrument)

Add this to your Tape Delay arsenal. It’s not part of TapeDelay because it’s weird enough to be its own purpose (dedicated plugins for purposes is more or less my thing). 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 August 8, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

TapeDelay2

TL;DW: TapeDelay2 is a new implementation of a flexible tape echo.

TapeDelay2.zip(618k)

Woot! This ought to come in handy.

TapeDelay2 gives you substantial changes over my original TapeDelay. It’s no longer trying to do the ‘Iron Oxide’ style tone shaping the original one did. In fact, it’s not even a delay in the same sense as its predecessor.

Instead, it’s a brand new, undersampled, Airwindows-bandpassed monster ready to make a whole pile of very convincing sounds. As plugin delays go, this covers a big range of purposes.

You’ve got a nice long delay time that’s still available at higher sample rates, thanks to the undersampling techniques. The delay line (and the regeneration) makes use of Airwindows bandpasses, but only on the undersampled content: meaning that if you’ve got it set to very nearly full range (resonance of zero) it’ll give the same subtle highpassing and lowpassing no matter what sample rate you’re at (a normal bandpass would have to roll off closer to the sample rate’s Nyquist frequency, in other words it would let through too many highs to do a proper tape emulation). You can tighten the bandwidth by increasing resonance. You can adjust the region you’re highlighting. And you can still adjust the frequency control even when set to full wide, which gives you more of a tilt EQ. It really turned out to have a lot of flexibility, and there’s two separate bandpasses so that you can shape the overall tone and also focus in on the regenerations if you like. Vintage sounds in the classic Airwindows way, meaning ‘no overprocessing, just high fidelity clean and simple processing’. Also, the dry/wet operates like my recent reverbs: 50% means full dry AND full wet, so you can bring in subtle echoes without altering the gain of your underlying track. Use it like a kind of reverb, with whatever tone and resonance works for you!

And lastly, just to top it off, Tape Flutter. This is a new implementation that I’ve never tried before. Instead of a simple vibrato, in TapeDelay2 the flutter keys off the amplitude of the underlying track, making it a lot more wavery and irregular. Subtle effects are easily achieved in most settings, and crank it up for more of a warbly dirty-tape quality. It should be irregular enough to sound like real tape wobble. It’s done by modulating the tape speed… because unlike any previous Airwindows tape effect, TapeDelay2 works by taking a full-length tape loop and literally speeding it up, rather than trying to change the length of the delay in any way. So both the warble, and any manipulations you make to the delay time, act like messing with the pitch of a physical tape machine with a set record and playback head… which turns out to be the best way to do this :)

This is one of the good ones. Hope ya 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 August 1, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

Hull

TL;DW: Hull is an alternate form of highpass/lowpass filter.

Hull.zip(589k)

Funny thing happened on the way to making a new version of TapeDelay :)

This is the second time I’ve done a filter based on stuff the stock market folks have got up to, and both of ’em start with H. First there was Holt, and now this is Hull. It’s set up to work as either a lowpass or highpass filter: the Bright control is really a dry/wet. Bright hard left gives you darkening and the normal output of the filter, Bright hard right subtracts the output giving you a highpass.

This is another audio chainsaw/proof of concept. I feel it’ll be useful as part of other plugins, in a controlled setting, but you can play with it however you like. Be careful, as setting the Freq control very high (increasing the averaging the plugin runs on, and lowering the cutoff frequency) can produce LOTS of CPU munching. I’ve left it that way in case people find a need for it and can handle the CPU demands, but especially at high sample rates it’s a beast at super-high averaging windows.

Hull is a form of playing averaging filters against each other to produce an ‘accurate’ picture of underlying movement beneath noise. This is of course not true: it only appears to be giving optimal information, but it’s effectively synthesizing fake info to make the chart look more specific in its trajectories. It does a really good job of looking like it’s magically clearing away the randomness, but I don’t believe it really is, and you can hear it in the audio performance: it’s dirty, produces obvious artifacts and accentuates weird stuff.

But for a sound effects filter, this is great! So, you can use Hull for various purposes, knowing it has ‘its own sound’ and will really bring a tone to your filtering. It sounds like a grungy old school analog filter that’s maybe distorting and being overloaded by the power of the audio going through it. The lowpass and highpass forms have very distinct tones: lowpassing sounds resonant and sonorous, and reminds me of the oldest Emu samplers (I’m working on getting a Eurorack filter that uses the same chip, to further explore this since I don’t yet have an SP1200). Highpassing does the opposite: it sounds like high frequency boosts done using Hull have a particular airiness and lightness to them.

Taking it way down to the bass and demolishing your CPU in the process, a couple interesting things happen. Lowpassing gives you kicks with a LOT of punch, which let through a bunch of midrange in a way that accentuates impact. (There may be a way to implement this with much lower CPU if it’s a fixed frequency filter: the buffer size isn’t a problem, but allowing the adjustment means implementing it naively and doing things the hard way). Highpassing way down in the bass gives an equally distinctive sound which would translate over smaller speakers very effectively.

This was a good day at work! I feel like modified versions of this principle will lead to some very cool-sounding EQs, even to stuff on the ’emulation’ side of things: this is because I like the sonority and intensity of these filters. They CAN also be CPU-efficient, though this implementation is not (except at high frequencies, where it is fine).

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 July 25, 2021
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

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