Airwindows

BassAmp

TL;DW: BassAmp is an old plugin with new tweaks, that gives some bass guitar tones.

Here’s the plugin I thought I had last week!

This is BassAmp. (I’ve been asked to do amp sim type plugins, so it’s a start). Back in the day I experimented with some of these things, though I’ve always been more interested in wiring up physical hardware, especially for guitar distortions and things. I’ve brought this one up to date in some ways, debugging a problem with the ‘dub’ channel and using my modern techniques for dithering to the floating point bus, and so on.

It’s got basically a bright channel, midrange (which is just dry, as a slider), a bass channel with a characteristic woolly tone that has a kind of noisy blur on the small amount of treble it does have, and a ‘sub’ channel that really doesn’t work, so use it as a crazy special effect. BassKit might get you a cleaner sub-octave, but this will give you a trashy sub-octave that’s mostly garbage, even on a single-note line. So you’ll be leaving it off, I think.

I’m also working on a new EQ, on matrix reverb techniques (on livestream!), have revised all my Biquad filters to have simple dry/wet controls on the end as my inverse/dry/wet stuff didn’t work properly, have come up with a method with the new EQ to place adjustable filter range in the middle of the control even for extreme sample rates while leaving the full Nyquist range available on the same control, and I’ve fixed ClipOnly (that last, is available right now if you’re concerned). What was wrong with ClipOnly was that if you were using VST on a 64-bit wide audio buss, ClipOnly would give you output that only covered the 32 bit floating point buss, not the full 64. I found the problem (NOT by listening for it! :D ) and fixed it and now it’s fixed, so if you like attending to conceptual details like that, re-download it here: ClipOnly.zip

All this is supported by Patreon, of course. Like I said in the video, if you’re in trouble bail off the Patreon and I promise I’ll be okay. Or at least I will if I go have a rest and get some sleep: for some reason I’m really exhausted. Can’t imagine why, with such a calm week we’ve all been having :) anyway, Patreon whatever, still working on a bunch of stuff, also playing a lot more music livestreams these days and I’m available for tech/plugin questions once I stop jamming (or before I get rolling) so that’s me being a little more available.

Talk to ya later, plugin mongers :)

Date November 8, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 10 Comments

TremoSquare

TL;DW: TremoSquare is a squarewave tremolo effect that only switches on zero crossings.

TremoSquare.zip(348k)

Surprise! More sound design, texture-making, mix-blendering fun from Airwindows.

I meant to put out BassAmp today, but it’s not ready: needs more work. But I had this weird little critter handy, and so it’s skipping ahead whether you like it or not!

And that depends on what you get up to, signal processing wise. TremoSquare comes out of one of my livestreams, where I coded a plugin from scratch one Monday so people could watch the process. (I do that now.) It’s a squarewave tremolo, but it only transitions from silent to full volume on the zero crossings.

What that does, is firstly give the aggressive tremolo a nice warm coloration that doesn’t click or crackle, even on bassy sounds. But secondly, if you ramp up the frequency super high, it stops registering as a frequency because the crossings take precedence and interfere with the frequency of the transitions. So, you get a distinct sort of ‘de-rezzing’ effect that’s literally nothing but a tremolo, except it’s sculpted to be smoother and more graceful. It doesn’t tempo sync: think of it more like that effect on Bowie’s ‘Diamond Dogs’ album of singing through a fan that’s on. It’s got a dry/wet control so it can be faded in for effect, and the frequency range of the tremolo is extremely huge.

Hope you like it! I meant to do an entirely different plugin, but I just had this lying around…

All this is supported by Patreon, otherwise I wouldn’t have got this far and you wouldn’t have this, free and open source. Thanks to everyone who’s supporting the Patreon, and I’m fiercely working on bringing even more things to the table… without slacking off on the weekly plugin posting. You never can tell when you’ll get a nifty audio tool that fits perfectly with what you do, and that’s where the fun is for me :)

Date November 1, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

BiquadTriple

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

BiquadTriple

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

Chris

BassAmp

TremoSquare

BiquadTriple

Nikola

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