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Chris

Hi! I've got a new plugin you can have! These plugins come in Mac AU, and Mac, Windows and Linux VST. They are state of the art sound, have no DRM, and have totally minimal generic interface so you focus on your sounds.

Reverb

TL;DW: Reverb is simplified and tuned MatrixVerb, adjusting everything for each optimum verb size.

Reverb.zip(398k)

In some ways I think this is even better, but I know people like to fiddle with knobs, so MatrixVerb had to go first. And yet…

Reverb is my new go-to reverb. Why? Because it takes all the interactivity of MatrixVerb and boils it down to ONE slider, and a dry/wet. It does all the same things: centered sounds spread, there’s a subtle detune as if sound was passing through temperature differences in the room, high frequency stuff falls away accurate to the sound of real air in reference concrete cavern recordings: it IS MatrixVerb, in every detail. Except it’s adapting all of that, on the fly, to best suit whatever size of reverb space you seek. Think in terms of ‘bigness’ and just go: if things are too cavernous, get smaller, if they’re not reverberant enough get bigger. Reverb always does its best for whatever size of space you’re making. If you need to get crazier, MatrixVerb still exists. You’ll get results faster with Reverb… so much so, that I’ve replaced MV in the Airwindows Starter Kit with Reverb. That’s how much I like it: it’s the space-maker I would show newcomers first, the most approachable way to audio ambience.

Hope you like it. It is free, and if you think it’s good to get things like this every week, you can throw another $50 a year at my Patreon as if this was a commercial plugin for you to buy. Who knows, by next year I might have made another plugin you like :D

If you’d like to see the Cheap Ass Rhymes rhyming dictionary I was talking about, it can be found here :)

Cheap Ass Rhymes

Hi! This isn’t a plugin. It’s a side project… in purely text form. Copy and paste it if you’d like a local copy of this!

Cheap Ass Rhymes is a tiny library crossing several concepts of interest to lyric-writing. One is the concept of vowel sounds in singing: the rhymes are organized by sound, like ‘AAAH’ or ‘EEEE’. Several of the vowels are also given a special category, ‘sustain’: these are the words where you could hang on the vowel for an extended time, or even leave off the end of the word and still get the meaning across. You’re meant to move across the vowel sounds in a comfortable way, akin to ‘melodic math’ in pop hit writing. You can also reach for an adjacent category for a real cheaty rhyme that’s kinda right but not a real rhyme

The other concept comes from the XKCD “Up Goer Five” concept, which is about describing things with the ten hundred most common words in English. There’s a handy text editor, but it doesn’t come with a rhyming dictionary. There’s also a book, Thing Explainer!

Cheap Ass Rhymes is the crossing of these concepts. It’s the same pool of words (not labeled Up Goer Five as that’s XKCD property) but organized to enable lyric writing, roughly in order of how high the vowel sound is. The brightest vowel is EEEE, a good shrieking vowel is IIII, EEAH is your classic rock-n-roll scream, EAAH is a hard ‘A’ sound that can project a lot, UHH and URR make for death metal vocals, and so on. You can write very accessible pop songs through reaching for this rhyming dictionary. It’ll give you all the low-hanging fruit: fill in other words as needed, or stick to the Cheap Ass Rhymes for maximum pop reach! Hope you like it :) Read More

MatrixVerb

TL;DW: MatrixVerb is a wildly adjustable, strangely colorful reverb for deep and flexible spaces.

MatrixVerb.zip(410k)

First, the Swiss Army Knife reverb! (a more cooperative one is to follow)

This is the result of some deep diving into Householder reverb algorithms (a way of taking four delay lines and turning them into infinite reverb). It’s different from anything I’ve done before, reverb-wise: extremely flexible, and incorporating some neat new tricks (for instance, the highs fall away at the same rate they would in a giant concrete cavern, allowing for REALLY huge-sounding spaces as well as convincing smaller spaces). It’s actually two parallel Householder reverbs in the place of one.

But what would happen if you had them feed back into each other, not just into themselves?

Turns out two different things can happen. One is a twisting and distorting of the sonic space into a distinctly… SPRING-like tonality. If you push the flavor knob towards 1.0, you increasingly get that clangy spring reverb thing, either subtly or overbearingly.

The other is this: apparently the opposite of a spring is a plate. Because when the Householder tanks feed back into each other inverted, they cancel out those same things and produce a whonging booming dense solidness that I remember, very well, from building a REAL plate reverb out of a big sheet of steel hanging from springs. I should say that real one I built was not a GOOD plate reverb… but I remember what it was like, and I can bring back the feel of it with this strange beast and its inverted broken feedback thing. This is one of those Airwindows plugins that lets you cut off your own foot with giddy abandon: all the bad settings are totally available. But if you know how to tune it, you might get something quite magical.

You get damping (from ‘almost’ infinite reverb down to very very damped), an overall tone control to handle whether the verb is bright or not, the ‘flavor’ control that leans either platey or springy or neutral, a room size that will go unreasonably huge even at 96k, and dry/wet. Stay tuned for stuff that’s more ‘preset’ and always gives you useful/good settings: that’s coming too. But this one is the reverb of doom: the most wild range of settings and tonalities and spaces, and the neat thing is apart from the global tone control at top, it’s all about manipulating the heart of the algorithm in significant ways. None of the adjustments are arbitrary: for the range of useful tonality, this reverb is very simple to operate.

Hope you like it. It is free, and if you think it’s good to get things like this every week, you can throw another $50 a year at my Patreon as if this was a commercial plugin for you to buy. Who knows, by next year I might have made another plugin you like :D

Acceleration2

TL;DW: Acceleration2 is Acceleration, better! Updated for high sample rate and more extreme effect.

Acceleration2.zip(352k)

Hi! Let’s say goodbye to 2020 with an amazing plugin and another pile of 2020 awfulness! :D my video is super broken, I’m showing the plugin in a new DAW that is the most irritating open-source project I’ve ever seen, and I haven’t got the strength to deal with any of it so we’re stuck with it!

But the plugin… ah, now that worked out nice. (except, anyone using the Linux .so version PLEASE check it for me, more on that later)

If you can’t face the video (I sure can’t! But it starts working as soon as I have either the DAW or my video game onscreen, then dies as soon as it’s just the camera again) here’s what you should know about Acceleration2.

Acceleration2 is an updated version of my high-frequency limiter, Acceleration. It’s like a brightness control that doesn’t really take away apparent brightness, just glues it really hard. Acceleration limiting is what you’d use mastering to vinyl, to avoid burning out the cutting head: it will get you a nice retro tone without obviously coloring things. It is not an ’emulation’ of any specific gear: real mastering engineers are not looking for ’emulation of Neumann sound’ or anything like that, they’re looking to get the functionality of this in the most colorless way.

It’s been updated to work exactly the same at all sample rates (the previous one had issues adapting to them) and now has more intense depth of effect: if you crank it up you can make things real soft and dull. Don’t do that :) the purpose is not to do what you could do with an EQ, the purpose is to glue things and take the edge off the super-highs without harming the sparkle and air of the recording. Acceleration2 can do that real well: you might even find it useful if you’re doing very digital mixes and avoiding my other stuff like Console7. If you put this on the mix buss of an otherwise super-digital mix, you can make the highs prettier without making them any darker or duller. Do that by applying only small amounts of the Limit control.

That’s the top control, for those watching the video: Ardour may be able to do a Console-based mix and put the plugins post-fader, but it can’t draw a generic AU in such a way that you can read it, at least not if you’re dark-themed. Woopsy. Back to Logic next time, I guess. Thanks, one last dose of 2020 :D

Patreon means I can keep going even when things are terrible and ridiculous. See ya in 2021… when I’ll be launching my DIY Analog Synth project in earnest, just as soon as I’ve recovered from the holiday season, which is always pretty brutal. I’ve got a good feeling about a lot of the things that are coming, and it should be great fun when it all takes off and starts to fly. Cheers, all :)

The video game, “Clusterfluff” (no sense giving it a good name) is at https://github.com/airwindows/ClusterFluff.
Binaries for it can be downloaded at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/0t69v1b1zfatl/ClusterFluff_Binaries

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If you’re pledging the equivalent of three or more plugins per year, I’ll happily link you on the sidebar, including a link to your music or project! Message me to ask.