Airwindows

BrightAmbience3

TL;DW: BrightAmbience3 adds undersampling for high sample rates, and better feedback.

A Chris from Airwindows’ work is never done… but we’re making some progress where it matters most :)

BrightAmbience is a very old plugin. The original was all about taking sounds coming in, and transforming them into lengths of extruded and very bright reverb. BrightAmbience2 transformed that, in turn, into a more adaptable creation that used inter-aural delays to create a subtle stereo effect like an aura around mono content.

BrightAmbience3 adds undersampling. Now high sample rate mixes retain a consistent tone and reverb length to what the CD-rate plugin would do… and it’s more CPU-efficient running at the elevated rates… and the subtle darkening in tone makes it worth a re-listen.

But now, on top of all that, we’ve got a new way to apply feedback at the ‘wider’ reverb settings, which allows you to feed THOSE back too. And that means, BrightAmbience3 has just taken on a new life for a variety of vibey, distinctly analog-feeling blurred delay effects. Even the really wide reverb settings will still feed back at full crank (though they just give you a sort of droney resonant quality) and the medium settings produce a variety of unusual sounds that are a little bit like when you have a crummy old antique echo effect, and it has no clarity, but when you turn up the feedback strong retro flavors begin to take over… you can’t get clean infinite regeneration that way, but tune it to taste and dial back the feedback control until you have enough echo for your purposes.

Or, ignore the feedback and just use it as BrightAmbience, but with a greater range of effect at higher sample rates, and a richer tone thanks to the undersampling.

I hope you like it. I’m soon to launch into the much awaited ‘Emu filter emulation’ project, though I’ve got some more undersampling projects to take on. Also, much work is underway to get new music recorded so you can start hearing something else for a change: ever since the updating every plugin to Mac M1 native operation (AU and VST both) there’s been no time for anything. But, patience and diligence will eventually produce all good things in their time :)

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 18, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Air2

TL;DW: Air2 is a different bright EQ with silk tone and high sample rate support.

Air2.zip(615k)

Energy2 came out so well that I thought I’d follow it with an undersampled version of Air!

Except, with a bunch of extra stuff which isn’t part of Energy, just ‘cos :)

Here’s what you get: Air2 has three treble-boost bands, Hiss, Glitter and Air. The first two are very like what’s in Energy2, but Air2 is NOT the same: it’s a different algorithm, not done the samw way Energy2’s ‘Rat’ band is done, and it has a broader, softer air band that’s less ‘raw harsh energy injection’ and more ‘bright and pretty’.

And then, they all run through a ‘Silk’ control… inspired by but NOT the same as the Neve Portico Silk circuit. That is a real hardware transformer biased into second harmonic creation by a DC current. Air2’s Silk control is the same thing as Single Ended Triode (which you can download and use already) but only applied to the highs out of Air2, so it’s the same general concept but is not a clone of the Portico preamp. Plus if they freak out I will rename it to ‘Sow’s Ear’: it’s part of a treble brightener and the same basic functionality and as far as I’m concerned, nothing is stopping me from asymmetrically distorting highs, and Silk is the best general term for what that does. Except with mine you can push it too far for effect, because of course you can :)

And finally, unlike Energy2, the Dry/Wet control for Air2 strikes a new balance between the Energy style of increasing the effect, and the traditional Dry/Wet control. New with Air2, you can now turn it to full-wet and get ONLY the output of the brightener bands. They’re not exactly filters but they act like it, and by adjusting them against each other you can produce insanely treble-boosted sounds and wipe out everything else using Dry/Wet. The way it works is, up to 75% (0.75) you still have full volume Dry. It won’t re-balance your track, just add whatever Air2 highs you’re looking for. Then, between 0.75 and 1 (full Wet) the dry goes away, so if you crank it up all the way you get the fullest extreme, but for most normal use it’s like Energy2, taking an unvarying dry signal (which is NOT undersampled) and adding however much of the effect you like.

I 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 11, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Energy2

TL;DW: Energy2 is electrifying fixed-frequency treble boosts for high sample rate.

Energy2.zip(642k)

Folks who aren’t Airwindows fans from way back might not know what this is. My video demonstrates a lot of it, but let me try to sum up…

Energy2 is energy boosts. Mostly treble, but you can also bring out aggression in the high-mids. These are NOT done through usual means. They’re a weird little algorithm that’s tied to the sample rate, and the big deal with Energy2 as an update is that it’s using my undersampling (which I just recently improved) to function as intended at high sample rates: it’s also more CPU-efficient than the original, but otherwise it’s the same (the original Energy might still be preferable for some, for instance if you absolutely must work at 48k and find it works better for you than Energy2 at that rate).

When I say energy boosts, what I mean is: this is not a normal EQ. You could not make the Energy2 sound happen by mimicking the frequency curve using a pile of biquad filters, or worse yet phase accurate EQ. It’s an entirely different algorithm, and this is what you get. Energy2 has enormous edge and focus around attack transients, not smearing them with pre-ring or high-Q traditional filtering, even though it produces very steep curves and isolates specific tones. Energy2 also has a definite color in how it adds frequencies: if you’re boosting upper mids with one of the lower sliders, you also get a bunch of highs along with it. Part of the sound. Probably shouldn’t struggle to remove those overtones too hard.

You can combine the sliders in weird ways to get very striking tone colors, but I think Energy2 is at its best when you focus on one color at a time, perhaps with a little of another color added or subtracted (less than zero means taking that tone color out: but remember, this is Energy2, it’s never completely tame or predictable). The breakthrough with Energy2 is that it’s designed to run at elevated sample rates, undersamples its boosts, but unlike the original Energy, it mixes that with a NON-undersampled Dry to get best of both worlds: the exact tone colors it ought to have, but against an unaltered, hi-res background. Since Energy’s generally able to get obnoxious levels of boost, the thing to do is get sounds where at least one slider is cranked out as far as it’ll go, and then use Inv/Dry/Wet to use only as much of that added energy as you need.

You get high and upper mid boosts, all the way up into the highest of air bands, that are more like they’re part of the original sound and not even added using EQ at all… but complete control over how much of that is added to the fully high-resolution sound at elevated sample rates. (and at CD rates, it works just like the original Energy, but with the CPU enhancement from not processing unused bands, plus the Inv/Dry/Wet is run at a higher word length than before, and uses modern Airwindows dithering to the floating point buss: that’s how old the original Energy was)

If I make a special Airwindows 96k mixing kit, like Starter Kit but more for experts adopting my mixing system rather than beginners, Energy2 almost defines what that would be like. It’s a very strong way to get a more Airwindows-y sound. (It’s also a nifty sort of anti-Soothe: nothing will pop out vibey overtones, intensity, and sonority like this plugin)

Hope ya like it. It’s one of the special ones. :)

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 4, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Chamber

TL;DW: Chamber is a feedforward reverb based on the golden ratio.

Chamber.zip(622k)

I actually meant to do something completely different. Honest.

It was time to dig into the feedforward reverbs again, maybe rearrange them in some interesting way. Do something with the geometry of them, have them go two-into-three-into-four or something along those lines, and we were hanging out in the Monday coding livestream, starting to experiment… and one of my crew tossed out a sequence of numbers. Fibonacci numbers. Could we hear what those sounded like as delay constants?

Wasn’t bad. Chat got buried in Fibonacci numbers for a while: we are always enthusiastic at finding weird applications of things that shouldn’t be any use. After all, to get reverb tails to become seamless, the delay constants have to be set up properly. Prime numbers are key. Fibonacci sequences have nothing to do with this. And then, someone in chat observed… as the Fibonacci numbers get bigger they start approximating to the golden ratio.

Yoicks, scooby! We’d better try it! AND THEN…

Chamber is a feedforward reverb, using three banks of four delays each in a Householder feedback matrix, except it’s feedforward. Only the very end feeds back into the beginning again, just like Verbity, just like Galactic (it is dual-mono like Verbity, as its peculiar merits fit well with a dual-mono arrangement). And the delays go to a longest delay (maximum delay size) and each one in turn, back to the first, is exactly the golden ratio smaller than the previous. It’s like a big spiral of delay times, perfect to lots of decimal places. If you listen to just one instance of each delay (by turning Longness to zero, and Chamber lets you HAVE literally zero feedback), that’s a weird stuttery slapback. By itself, an arbitrary little chirp, a complicated slapback that doesn’t sound particularly interesting.

And then if you turn the feedback up, with Longness, it stretches out into a continuous, seamless, perfect reverb tail, just as if all the delay times had been worked out to be perfect little prime ratios.

This was an astounding discovery. It means you can dial in any degree of feedback or none, use any delay time (everything’s calculated out on the fly), do anything with it and it’ll adapt. It’ll always sound like a chamber, hence the name, but it’s maybe more malleable than any reverb I’ve ever made. And to make it even more malleable, Chamber’s Darkness control is tweaked so that the fall-off over time is always accurate to the sound of audio decaying in air in a theoretically ultimate room (studied from recordings of giant underground concrete cisterns) but the tone-shaping is darkened using very warm, basic IIR filters. And on top of that, a new control for the feedforward reverbs: since Chamber is such a studio tool, I gave it a highpass. So you can plunk it on any sort of buss or channel, run it mostly dry, bring in the reverb (Chamber and Verbity are designed so as you add verb, the dry remains unaltered until you get to 0.5 on the Wetness control, at which point the verb is at full volume and you start fading the dry signal) and then begin dialing back the bassiness of the reverb without touching the dry. Very useful for a chamber or plate send, and built right in!

Hope you like it. Oh, and one more thing: in working on this, I found a bug that was in the Undersampling code I use. The bug was making a bit of unwanted edge, only in high sample rate stuff, only above 20kHz. I’d had someone discover this in Verbity, but I didn’t know what to do other than filter it at the time, and hadn’t done anything yet.

So now (as of right now: redownload what you need) Verbity, Galactic, IronOxideClassic2, and Chamber are FIXED. Go back and redownload them, or get them out of the collections for various different platforms. They have all had the ultrasonic noise cleaned up: there is still a touch of audio there as part of the algorithm, but it turns out it’s much less than I thought and that’s reflected in cleaner sound. It should not change saved mixes significantly as it is entirely supersonic, but if it did it would only help as the traces of noise weren’t useful for any purpose, they were a bug, samples being slightly out of order at 96 and 192k. No change at 44.1 or 48k.

Chamber actually goes a step farther, in that I added more code that subtly averages the supersonic samples… that can apply to new plugins going forward, but Verbity, Galactic, and IronOxideClassic2 don’t have that as it could work like a tone change. So, compare the new Verbity to Chamber if you’d like to check out the tiny amount of added depth we’ll have going forward.

Hope you like Chamber. Just a bit of a detour after all those strange filters :)

(original version before fixing denormalization, ChamberFirst.zip(622k))

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 June 27, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

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