Airwindows

LRFlipTimer

TL;DW: LRFlipTimer is a utility that swaps Left with Right every few (1-10) minutes.

While I’m working on the Big Sur issues and getting my studio back together for streaming… and measuring the Mackie 1202 I got, and putting another De Lisle Pentatone in another guitar and making a plugin of it and etc etc etc… hey why not, here’s a utility plugin.

I don’t know how useful this’ll be for you: a person asked me for it, and I was able to do it. This just does one thing.

Every few minutes (as in, one minute to ten minutes) it swaps the L and R channels. It sweeps them across in about a tenth of a second, to prevent any sort of pop or anything. When it’s in LR or RL mode, it is 100% direct pass-through of the audio data word, so this is as clean as stuff like LeftToMono: it’s one of those ones that just copies the data over, not even touching it. That said, this doesn’t belong in your mix: the idea is that if you’re mixing and you do stuff asymmetrically, it’s like visual arts: you might need to flip the canvas left-to-right to see if things are off balance. That’s all this plugin does. You set how many minutes will elapse before it flips or re-flips.

Again, I don’t know if this is gonna set your world on fire, but somebody asked. And it’s a nice break from all the intense struggling with setting up a machine to run Big Sur and all. I’ll let you know when that develops further. See some of you folks on Monday for my coding stream! And I’m actively working on being able to resume the music-making streams in a way that’s comfortable to do, and will give me novel music to use for each plugin posting. It seems like that ought to be possible, I just overcomplicate everything. More later :)

Brought to you by the Airwindows Patreon, which will unlock Hardware Synth Building DIY when I hit $2000 a month, at which point I start sending people electronic parts free so long as I’m above the threshold :)

Date February 7, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Preponderant

TL;DW: Preponderant is Airwindows Anti-Soothe, a strange tone intensifier and balancer.

Preponderant.zip(377k)

Sometimes, it’s just… strange.

Preponderant was created in an attempt to combine the old ResEQ concept with Soothe, in such a way that it’d give you three tightly controlled bands of emphasis (one thing Airwindows is all about is maximizing resonant sonority and intensity, not blindly removing it) and then also balance them on the fly so that all the bands would tend to be constantly active. This would bring up the high band, for instance, giving that ‘hyping of detail’ effect. In theory, it’d work.

And maybe it does. But I don’t blame you if this one just drives you crazy and makes you mad. I had to scramble to get rid of an extra 24 dB of gain on tap for each band because when I started making the video, the plugin went insane and started blowing up: I thought I could let it throw in extra energy but I was sorely mistaken. One hasty bugfix later, we have… something? We have Preponderant. There is thankfully nothing else like it anywhere :D

Turn up Resonance and Wet to hear what it’s focussing on. Use the Narrow, Medium and Wide controls to dial in frequency bands: each is twice as wide as the previous, so using Narrow will give you the tightest focus on a frequency range. Set ’em to areas in your sound (middle is the midrange). Preponderant is named because it can be tuned between areas of preponderant energy, and areas of power or areas of no energy, and it’ll compensate to give about the same output for each band you select, no matter how much energy is ‘supposed’ to be there. It’ll boost quietness, suppress intense resonant areas that are much louder than they should be, or you can simply tune to a different frequency range and avoid the resonant stuff.

Also, it’s not a compressor. In no sense is it turning down louder stuff, or up quieter stuff. If you put it on drums you’ll scream in horror (unless you know exactly what you’re doing and have other drums to fill in a more continuous sonic flow). It’s rapidly balancing the bands while keeping the dynamics just as they are. Might be good on spot mics, toms or kick or something. Horrible on room mics or overall mics. Good on heavy guitar stems as it’ll retain dynamics there. It will be immediately obvious whether Preponderant is working on a track or stem.

You HAVE to pick real audio for every band, or it will just make some up. Subsonics on a skinny guitar? It’ll turn down the other bands until it thinks they balance with whatever subsonics you selected. By the same token, ice-pick zone on the same guitar? It’ll make it balance with the other bands you chose.

This will sound terrible. So, turn down the resonance until the sound is less insanely resonant. It’ll still sound terrible. Turn the dry/wet right back to dry (which will probably sound real boxy and dull by comparison).

Then, feed in a little of the Preponderant, just until you start to hear it accentuate the stuff that you chose.

THERE you go.

Preponderant is one of those Airwindows audio chainsaws. The final version (without the 24 dB boosts) is intentionally made to just cut and restrict stuff, explicitly so if you don’t know what you’re doing you’ll hate it and not use it. This is intentional as you could hurt your mix, your ears, and your sensibilities.

On the other hand, if you know how to dial in areas of power and focus and find three things about a sound that are useful in the fray of a mix, I’m not sure I’ve ever made a plugin that will so aggressively give you what you ask it for. (and if that’s not enough, a few of you will want to use the original version. I’m not going to encourage this, and you must choose: that or the real, volume-cutting version. They install with the same name and the same ID so you can’t have both, and shouldn’t have the boosty version, ever. But if you want to blow up your mix, then YES, you may. The rest of you, and me, please work with the one that doesn’t boost?)

Have fun and be careful out there! Brought to you by the Airwindows Patreon :)

Date January 31, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Infinity

TL;DW: Infinity is a MatrixVerb specifically designed to sustain and layer sounds forever.

Infinity.zip(383k)

Here’s a follow-up to what I’ve been doing with Householder reverbs, and my recent plugins MatrixVerb (for flexibility) and Reverb (optimized for size variation only). The algorithm I’m using has one more specialty: infinity! The way it works, if you do nothing else except feed it back on itself, it will sustain infinitely: that’s its basic, natural state.

And so I did. :)

Of course that’s too simple: there’s a filter (not in the feedback path) that will let you sweep its frequencies in and out, from deep space to bright and unnatural textures. There’s a size control that will let you resize the space from gong-like tones to the depths of galaxies… and a damping control that does NOT make the reverberations die away. Instead, it just applies a subtle darkening, useful if you’re looking for darker spaces.

More importantly, Infinity is tailored to handle anything from subtle noises to the full blast of a mix: if you saturate it and keep adding sound, what’ll happen is that it’ll begin to squeeze out earlier infinity to make room for what’s coming in. That way, the maximum level will stay under control, but it’ll also tend to emphasize the most recent thing you did (as long as it’s loud). If you’re not adding loud things, you’ll continue to build up the texture as you go.

It’s also a dual mono effect. What that means is, you’re adding things to infinitely sustain at distinct places in the stereo image. What’s on the left stays on the left, likewise with the right, centered stuff will stay centered. This is different from both MatrixVerb and Reverb, both of which will ‘spread’ centered information as the reverb continues. Infinity doesn’t have the stereo pitch shifting that would cause that to happen, because it’s entirely dedicated to providing pads and spaces that can literally sustain forever without change. So, it can also sustain a sound-space across the stereo field that doesn’t change the stereo mix, either. You can keep things mostly panned to the center, or put in super-wide stuff that’s fully L or R, or both.

My hope is that this is an inspiring tool for those who like making ambient spaces. You can combine it with MatrixVerb to have a distinct, unvarying source of infinite sound which is then broadened and made richer by the added options of MatrixVerb in a way you couldn’t do from MatrixVerb alone. Or, you can just use it as its own little instrument. Hope you like it!

I get paid to make these things full-time, every week, through being on Patreon. If you like that being part of your life, and sometimes you get a nice free plugin from me, you can join the Patreon provided you can afford to do it: otherwise, please let me give you plugins while you get into more of a position to give back. For now, things look good and I expect to even start my ‘DIY synth parts’ project before long. Then I’ll be able to give back in an even more exciting way than just making plugins every week. (but I’ll keep doing that as long as there are plugins to be made!)

Date January 24, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Channel9

TL;DW: Channel9 is Channel8 with ultrasonic filtering, and new Teac and Mackie ‘low end’ settings.

Channel9.zip(360k)

If you’re an Airwindows Channel fan, this release is kind of a big deal :)

Channel9 retains everything it had—the two-stage drive control, the newly improved highpass, the slew clipping—the same calibrated Airwindows algorithms to not clone, but give you the general sense of various fancy name brand consoles in a cleaner, less ’emulated’ way which lets the music through…

But now, Channel9 has the same ultrasonic aliasing-filtering that’s come to Console and other recent Airwindows plugins. In a new way! Because Channel9 isn’t just sticking to ’20k’ as its definition of supersonic. Instead, Channel9 steepens its filter with a teeny resonant peak at this cutoff point… and then selects it in keeping with what the real console would be doing, if you had it! The Neve is the most extended, well beyond 20k. The SSL cuts off tighter, gives more audible sparkle (due to the additional gain stages in a really huge SSL desk, the cutoff will be steeper over the entire desk). API is between the two. The lift at the peak comes before the saturation stage, for better smoothness when the console is being driven.

And then I went and added two MUCH more affordable ‘models’, with their own usefulness.

The new settings are ‘Teac’ and ‘Mackie’. That’s right, old school house/techno classic basement mixers! The Teac, I was able to reference recordings of a real unit. I didn’t get it perfect as the real board had a noticeable high-mids peak that doesn’t belong in Channel, but it’s the correct kind of dark and vibey. And the Mackie’s my take on what you get out of the classic vintage 1202: A hair leaner than the Teac, but brighter. They both grind a bit harder than any of the big expensive desks, they both have slightly more exaggerated reshaping of the deep bass (using the Capacitor2 algorithm, like the others), they both control the brightest highs much like you’d get in a classic old low end mixer. It’s two new settings that follow entirely different rules than the big guns, for folks who know how to use an actual mixer much like metal guitarists use a Tube Screamer.

You can still have your fancy desk models (only better: the ultrasonic filtering brings just the right additional distinction to the models) but now you can go cheap and get the tone and vibe of some house music warhorses. The sonic reshaping these low end models do is just the ticket for sculpting relentlessly synthetic sounds into an appealing result. And since it’s Channel… it won’t have the noise of the real ones, it won’t have weird extra colorations, it’ll honor more of your real mix as it reshapes it: sort of best of both worlds! You can always add funky colorations or noise to your digital mix, but you can’t remove that stuff from the real mixers. Channel9 will shape your sound in ‘classic’ ways but along Airwindows lines: getting out of the way so your sound is interfered with as little as possible.

Channel9 can be used anywhere you like. If you’re doing a Console mix, I’d put it after ConsoleBuss. If you’re not doing a Console mix, you can literally do anything you want with it: it’s a subtle distortion/fattener combined with a set of careful tone shaping algorithms. Hope you like it!

If you want to make like you bought the new Channel when it came out, you can throw another $50 a year (or whatever suits you) at my Patreon. That’s if you can afford to and if you like me doing this work as much as I am: take care of yourself first. I’m excited to see how much I can give people this coming year: I feel like there are great possibilities. The Patreon is mostly there to help me give stuff to people better, and more of it. We’ll see how far I can take it! :)

Date January 17, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 9 Comments

Chris

LRFlipTimer

Preponderant

Infinity

Channel9

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Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

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