Airwindows

BiquadTriple

TL;DW: BiquadTriple is a handy Airwindows cascaded biquad filter: steeper roll-off before resonance.

Here’s another utility plugin! This is the same as BiquadDouble, except it’s three stacked biquads. Otherwise the same: you get to set the frequency, Q etc. for all the filters in parallel. This saves time over doing three instances of Biquad, plus they’re run in series inside Console inside the plugin, so there will be a deeper tone out of this one.

It’s for if you wanted to get steeper filter slopes without the cutoff going resonant. This, like BiquadDouble, is very much ‘tools to make tools’, for if you’re mocking up some kind of effect and know you’re going to be using filters. You can test out what you’ll use in your effect, this way. Note: seems like the inv/dry/wet is really just wet/dry/wet, and I have too many new and more worthwhile plugins to put out to fuss over it so I’d advise just taking BiquadTriple as it is. I’d be using it as full-wet anyway though you can bleed in dry for more of a shelf effect if you’re doing a steep rolloff of some kind.

I expect to be doing some more variations on this as there are known ways to stack filters where the Q factors are very specific and staggered: however, those will be more aimed at the mixer/end user, and probably will be called isolators (that being a common term for this type of steep crossover-like filter). And again, I’ve got other things to put out that are more interesting, so more will be revealed as I do those experiments. I think an Airwindows isolator-style effect would be good. Bear in mind the biquads can be fussy about extreme settings and moving the sliders abruptly.

If I just made your silver bullet EQ (stranger things have happened) without even meaning to, by all means go to my Patreon and kick in an additional $50 a year. Or not, if you’d rather not. I never can tell what people will get super excited over, but the nice thing about relying on Patreon is that I don’t have to stick to only what I think will excite people or sell units. I can throw out a weird (or boring) experiment, that to me seems like no big deal, and if people love it then hey! It’s yours.

These days I’m coding plugins on my Monday streams while answering questions, so if you’d like to see that, drop by at 11:00 EST and join me. I’m also getting back into the music streaming as I work on improving my game there, and now I have the technology for being able to talk to chat while the synths are going! So that makes things a bit more interactive, on days I do that. You’ll be able to tell which is which, for the coding/Q&A streams will have an image of a laptop screen and code, and the music streams will have an image of Eurorack modules. Unless I build my DIY synth in which case it’ll be an image of that :)

Date October 25, 2020
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Nikola

TL;DW: Nikola is an Audio Tesla Coil plugin! Note: audio tesla coils don’t sound nice.

Nikola.zip(467k)

Sorry/not sorry!

Nikola was, I think, an April Fool’s plugin back in the day. In porting it to VST and making it available for the first time on Windows and Linux, I thought up some improvements, so its Voltage control now combines two different effects: at low Voltage it’s brighter and airier with little roar and sustaining industrial scrunch. At high voltage it goes more midrangey and turns into a complete disaster area.

An audio Tesla Coil fires bolts of lightning at audio rate. This is based off real recordings of such a coil, but the thing is it’s like trying to record fireworks: if you use good mics you just get a ‘pop’ because mics don’t react the way our ears do. So, for the full effect, turn Voltage way up and run it into a lot of distortion and reverb.

Or, you can use it to mangle individual tracks in a really industrial way: it’s a bit unpredictable what you’ll get, but the concept is of firing off impulse responses. But firing off lots of impulses gives you a convolution reverb: this is different, it retriggers the ‘zap’ at every zero crossing causing a different effect.

It’s a legacy plugin based on old experiments, so it doesn’t adapt to sample rates: in the video I’m running it at 96K which makes it sound different. If you’re at 192k it might be too pitch-shifted to be useful (though it’ll track the notes in the underlying track without issue). It’s useless to oversample this plugin, for this reason. If you can somehow undersample it that might be neat? Definitely one for the sound designers.

All this is supported by Patreon, as always. I hardly think this one is worth buying at $50, but who knows? It’s Patreon that kept me here working on all these until I got to a weird critter like Nikola. I hope you either like it, have a good laugh, or can safely ignore it :)

Date October 18, 2020
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

TripleSpread

TL;DW: TripleSpread is a stereo tripler with extra wideness and GlitchShifter processing.

TripleSpread.zip(366k)

Here’s a fun little toy that might make it into the toolkits of some otherwise non-Airwindows types :)

TripleSpread is based off the code of GlitchShifter, but it’s designed around one task, and that is the ‘split a track into three, pan one hard left and pitch it down a few cents, pan another hard right and pitch it up a few cents’. That’s what it does. It’s a tripler. Alternately, if you put it on a LR pair of instruments, it’ll double each of those instruments and stay very stereo. Or if you put it on an LCR submix, it can sound like about twelve instruments. That’s the specialty of TripleSpread: making a big wide stereo effect.

Except that it adds a new twist: as you bring up dry/wet, introducing the effect and progressively overpowering ‘dry’ (where the mono signal might be) it also fades out the mid content of the added stereo stuff. So you get a hyper-wide. Specifically, you get a hyper-wide that seamlessly fades between your clean, direct sound (however many sources you have in it) and the expanded, widened sound (adding pitch-shifted elements that are wider than the stereo field). These can be subtly pitch shifted, or nearly a semitone out if you crank it.

And if that’s not enough, it’s still Glitch Shifter based, so you can increase the tightness control until it glitches out or reverts to dry… or you can turn it way down, until the pitch shifted tripled voices hardly relate to the original sound at all. That might be cool for ambient pads, wide stereo synthetic things or what have you: it’ll add an unpredictable echoey effect that’s also pitch shifted. Tighten it up, and you control that vagueness as much as you like. Tighten it more, and you can tie it to whatever rhythmic element you like: it’s certainly capable of widening LCR guitars while keeping the ‘guitar orchestra’ effect relatively tight, or you can get silly and try it on percussive sounds as long as you’re OK with it either glitching, or blurring the timing.

All this is supported by Patreon, as always. So if you’d go and buy this at $50 for a perpetual license to be used on as many computers as you like plus you get the source code (I know, I’m so STRICT, what a meanie I am) then by all means go and add $50 to your Patreon pledge. Or, if you had one going, and this justifies keeping it going for another year, woohoo!

This is a fun one. Hope you like it. :)

Date October 11, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 6 Comments

Circle Of Fifths Reference Wheels

This post is something I’ve been promising: these are the chords I base my synthesizer music on. The idea is that I’m using Music Thing Modular Chord Organs, which I’ve hot-rodded, and I can apply control voltages to vary chords around any given location on this wheel. More randomness gives you more striking chord departures.

Rotating around the wheel (for ALL examples) means stepping by circle of fifths. For the two most recent wheels, the top set of chords (outlined in black) is actually the white keys on the piano. For each chord represented, if you START with that chord and stay in that mode it will be the mode written next to the chord (for instance, if you’re playing C Major, you’re in Ionian mode, and if you’re playing G7 major 7th you’re in Mixolydian mode). For every step to the side out of that radial stack of chords, one note changes out of the mode you’re using. Step farther (around the circle) and you go to increasingly difficult modes.

This is the Diatonic Wheel. As you can see, it starts with a scale from A to G, on the white keys of the keyboard. The first release of Airwindows Chord Organ Firmware comes with a set of SD card files that work with this wheel. On the down side, it has the locrian mode (centered on B minor diminished fifth chord) right in between major and minor, so it can give you chord sequences that are a little mysterious.

This is the Pentatonic Wheel. It’s exactly the same as the Diatonic wheel, except that I thought I’d see what happened if you went with only the pentatonic scale and stuck the two remaining notes in as afterthoughts. This one places minor, major, and dorian minor next to each other! It should produce more consistent chordal centers with a more defined ‘feel’ than the purely diatonic arrangement. If you offset the chord choice way into the center of the wheel, you’ll be choosing among phrygian minors flat ninths, mixolydian sevenths, locrian diminished fifths and lydian add11s so there’s a big character difference between the edge of the wheel and the center of it. There’s a certain logic to the arrangement, and I think functionally it’ll just work better. If you’re randomly generating a melody, you can leave the melody chord organ set to purely a diatonic scale and it’ll still work fine (melody generation implies you’re adding an independent control voltage to one of the oscillators, rather than using the same one that’s selecting chords/basses for everything else).

For further reference listen to some of the house music jams I’ve been doing for the last few years. That’s been the test bed for all this.

Click on the images to get larger images that you can save or print out. You can probably print these okay, and they’re easier to read if you can rotate the paper they’re on :)

Date October 5, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

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Circle Of Fifths Reference Wheels

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