Airwindows

XLowpass

TL;DW: XLowpass is a distorted digital EQ, inspired by retro sampler DSP.

Welcome to the Airwindows journey into vintage sampler land! This might prove to be a long journey, but every journey starts with a first step.

Maybe the first step was Mackity and MackEQ: hardware mixer emulations. (that’s not necessarily done, either: it’s the 1202, beloved to French House music, that I did, but the DnB-hounds liked the 8-buss.) But the follow-up is just the sort of thing I might want to look into: certain of the E-mu Z-plane filters. Apparently not even the really fancy stuff… but the way that the simple lowpasses and highpasses would distort when you abused them. And it seems nobody’s that interested in exploring that, because these are not analog filters or particularly sought-after, except by those in the know.

And we know some stuff about them, because the information is out there… but a lot of devs don’t think of them as interesting. They’re biquads, with hard clipping inside the EQ code, and implemented in certain ways for efficiency: and if you can have properly made stock DAW filters, why would you want lower-bit calculation or clipping or stuff like that?

XLowpass… is NOT the end destination. There will be more like it but the X series of Airwindows filters (handy to look up in the plugin list) are NOT the carefully tailored E-mu emulation (or at least tone-alike, to the best of my ability?) XLowpass is getting familiar with the CONCEPT, an internally distorted multi-stage biquad and how I can manipulate it to get sounds out of it. It’s not meant to itself sound like an E-mu e6400 (that being the sampler I have, so far), but it’s a plugin that can dial in a whole range of the craziness people had to go to a lot of trouble to do in the real sampler (internal distorting and so on). And you can run it into Mackity and see whether you’re within striking distance of some of the more gnarly DnB tones that belonged to the 90s, seemingly lost to time.

And when the Y series comes out, things will be even more off the hook, because Y stands for “WHY would you DO that?!?” and it means I do the same thing, except with wavefolding on the internal distortion. So those should get GNARLY.

And then when I get to work on the eventual ZLowpass etc, and stack them up against real Z-plane hardware (note, however, I will not be cloning the algorithms, I am just going to try and get the tone the same), then I’ll have some practice under my belt.

All this is brought to you by my Patreon, and by LOTS of popular demand I’ve agreed that rather than dedicating everything above $2k a month to donating CMOS chips and electronic parts to those wanting to DIY, I’ve agreed to save up for bigger and more spectacular/desirable samplers and things, in order to make plugins of them. It’ll take me a while to save up for say a SP1200, but people would really like me to attempt that sort of thing, so why not? Gives me more goals to shoot for.

In the Airwindows community department, there’s been something new about the Airwindows Chord Slide Rule I posted. You can still print out one of your own using my PDF, but Aykut Cirik thought it would be a fun idea to make a webpage that works like the Slide Rule, so you can use it on your phone. So as long as the link holds, you can go to https://www.trinity.be/airwindows_chordsliderule/ and have a quick reference to the Slide Rule as a webpage. Thank you, Aykut! :)

Date May 23, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Progress Report Some More

Hi! If those of you who want Airwindows VST plugins for Mac M1 processors (or signed Intel VSTs for use with Big Sur and later) could try this out I’d appreciate it. I’m beginning to do all the ports for the VSTs, having finished doing all the ports for all of the AUs. I’ll continue to make both kinds available but for now, these are just the ‘A’ plugins, as in those starting with A.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/scmhxt7lpynjeqb/SignedVSTs.dmg/file

I’ve got hundreds more to do, so if I’ve got anything wrong now is the time to fix it :) otherwise I will have to go back and do them all over…

The video here also crudely demonstrates something that took many hours of work building cables and setting stuff up: the E-mu e6400 Ultra sampler. I need to learn how to use this to the fullest so that I can then study what it’s doing, and make plugins that convey what this nifty old hardware does, much beloved by DnB heads since the Nineties.

This brings me to another sort of announcement. I’ve been telling everyone that if I hit $2000 a month I’d launch a DIY synth livestream in addition to what I already do, and would set aside anything I earned beyond that to give back to the community in the form of electronics parts, like chips and stuff. And I’m all set to do that… but the streams have gone SO slowly that I had to wonder if anyone with any sense actually wanted to do this, or if I was fooling myself. So I asked: my most recent Patreon post asks whether people want that, or if they’d rather I saved up to get other old gear and make plugins out of it.

And oh my, did I get an earful.

With totally overwhelming force people wrote in the comments to say that they all wanted the PLUGINS and had no or little interest in building DIY circuits… or if they did, they could get their own parts. They all said I should save up for fancier stuff (you know, sp1200s, 808s, all that sort of thing) instead. Except when they told me I should just take their money and go on a vacation :)

So, first things first: getting the Apple Silicon/signed VSTs working. I’ve got the ones starting with A, for now. Please test ’em. My hope is that some people will find they work better than the retro ones for their machines. Then, I’m going to need to spend some time getting good at the Emu sampler so I know what I’m shooting for, and then I’ll keep working on the Emu-related plugins such as the filters I’ve been developing, bit by bit, on Monday livestreams. Wednesday can continue to be DIY synth building as I’ve got all the parts I need, but I might do some VCV weeks or modular-jamming weeks, since I can’t seem to fit that in any other way and I miss it.

And we shall trundle along, steadily making some progress towards good things. All this is brought to you by my Patreon, which is apparently now about earning me money to buy REALLY vintage samplers such as the SP1200 and such things. I’ll set up some kind of thermometer showing how much progress that’s making, and once I’ve got some basics like that taken care of I’ll open it up to the Patreon as to what I should aim for next.

The signed .dmg file of all the new AU compiles is still at https://www.mediafire.com/file/yocowl32i440e7h/SignedAUs.dmg/file and the signed .dmg file of the new VSTs as they get added to the collection is at https://www.mediafire.com/file/scmhxt7lpynjeqb/SignedVSTs.dmg/file, and once I’m done with all that it will be time to overhaul the ENTIRE Airwindows website to include these downloads off the main site. Until then I’m handing them off to Mediafire, by the time this is done there won’t be any massive download waves to knock my site off the internets, because you’ll all have everything already :)

Date May 16, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Infinity2

TL;DW: Infinity2 expands Infinity with more tone shaping and a much-requested kill-switch!

Infinity2.zip(600k)

Here’s a much-requested upgrade! Infinity has been working out surprisingly well for people (surprising me, anyway, I got so excited about the feedforward reverb topologies that I thought Infinity was far too old school) except there’s quite a few DAWs that keep the plugin ‘live’ permanently if you’ve got it loaded. That, I didn’t expect. And so, there’s folks who are still sitting there waiting for their Infinity to clear out so they can add some new sounds to it.

And since it’s Infinity, they’ll be waiting a very very long time.

Until now!

Infinity2 is carefully kept to allow exactly the same tones as before. No undersampling, no changes, just the addition of a Feedback control as well as the Damping control, so you can shut the thing off (or turn it to a traditional dual-mono reverb if you wish).

But of course that would be too easy: so, more controls! Damping now works on all the reverb paths so to get the previous amount, set it to 0.125 or so. Zero is still full brightness, and now turning it up to 1 gives you a more significant treble fall-off effect. It’s possible that this can interact with frequencies to cause feedback reinforcement, so keep an eye out for that.

The allpasses at the beginning (which spread and smooth incoming audio) can now be bypassed with another control, for brighter, more transient-rich input sounds.

The maximum verb size (tied to sample rate like the original) is still exactly the same, but Infinity2 now lets you crank the pitch up to a LOT higher for when you’re doing weird effects with the plugin. That seemed like a nice tweak: if you don’t like it, try to not move the slider that far to the left :)

I hope people enjoy Infinity2. All this is brought to you by my Patreon, which is now doing so well that we’ve got to the DIY Synth Making streams I promised. It’s a little sooner than I expected, so I’m working on getting all that ready, but we’ve been having fun making a very simple 40106 oscillator make really strange noises through circuit-bending, all safely powered by a 9v battery. More to follow, bit by bit.

Plans for porting everything to MacVST M1 (Apple Silicon) are underway, slightly delayed, but soon.

If I see progress towards working Apple Silicon VCV Rack, which I believe is happening as a fork, I’ll look towards Rack modules being the next ports for the entire Airwindows library. I don’t want to deal with it unless it’ll run on the M1s natively as I think it’ll require that amount of CPU to do serious stuff, as I’ll be wanting to run at 96k or better, even on Rack (especially on Rack!)

The signed .dmg file of all the new AU compiles is still at https://www.mediafire.com/file/yocowl32i440e7h/SignedAUs.dmg/file

Have fun with Infinity2, and I’ll keep you posted!

Date May 9, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

MackEQ

TL;DW: MackEQ is the Mackie distortion but with treble and bass controls added.

MackEQ.zip(578k)

So this is either going to be a big success or make EVERYBODY mad at me :)

Folks who wanted Mackity, were looking to do some crazy things with it. We’re taking an old Mackie 1202, pre-VLZ (I have one and know how to abuse it for effect) and we’re mangling sounds with it. People wanted to take a kick drum, run it through one channel turned all the way up, patch that to another channel with crazy EQ and also turned up until ready to explode, and so on. Mackity was my best shot at just the input section of the 1202, with all the gain on tap but set up to work as close to ‘clean’ as these desks ever got: more so, in fact, as it doesn’t add hiss and chip noise. Mackity was really good at sounding exactly like that, for those who like patching out of the insert points and getting a reasonably hi-fi sound out of their old 90s mixer.

There are plenty of people who know without the shadow of a doubt, that the very idea is ridiculous: that, compared to your Neves and APIs etc, these tiny budget mixers are garbage.

They will HATE this plugin. This is the same thing only with the garbage EQs in the 1202, the original two-band version, in which you can also overdrive the op-amps inside the EQs for good measure. Nothing about this sounds nice. You might want to pad down the output if you try: it’s pretty horrifying.

Some folks will go and immediately do that… and some of those, are very used to their original Mackie analog mixers, and know the exact tone they should get. And I can’t tell you whether those folks will be happy with MackEQ, because I have the real one (not an 8-buss, but a 1202) to compare with, and I did not get a perfect exact clone. I got something else. I think it might be useful: certainly it can get the correct TYPE of tone, but I don’t believe I have the true 100% 90s drum and bass madness exactly down. There’s a texture in there, especially when you start aggressively distorting highs, that just defies being captured in a plugin, much like you don’t really get a Marshall Plexi in the box.

But I captured SOMETHING in a plugin, and it’s in the ballpark. If you can accept a slight re-voicing of the thing, or if your use of it doesn’t involve torturing hi-hats and such in the first place, you might find MackEQ is useful to you. That’s my hope. I daresay I’ll find uses for it myself… including, use after certain secret projects I’m still working on. Seems I’ve devoted myself to the DnB flame. If only I could play the music, I’d really be on to something :)

If you like me buying relevant gear so I can work with the real thing and learn how to make plugins like that, you can check out Mackity, and Srsly2, and MackEQ, and you could also jump on my Patreon which pays for such things. It looks like I’ve got the ports to Apple Silicon (M1 and beyond) well underway, and this month I’ll be trying to add M1 Mac VSTs to the mix. Remember, these things don’t help you until the DAW makers make true native versions, but then you ought to be off and running. The signed .dmg file of all the new AU compiles is still at https://www.mediafire.com/file/yocowl32i440e7h/SignedAUs.dmg/file and now includes MackEQ.

Date May 2, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 15 Comments

Chris

XLowpass

Progress Report Some More

Infinity2

MackEQ

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club