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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.

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!)

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! :)

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

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