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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.

Parametric

TL;DW: Parametric is three bands of ConsoleX EQ in advance.

Parametric in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Filter’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Parametric.zip(541k) standalone(AU, VST2)

So there’s a lot going on in Airwindowsland right now, and rather than disappear for a year and return with something amazing, it’s time to drop pieces of the next big thing so you can get used to them.

Parametric is basically 3/4 of the EQ section of ConsoleX, except that it’s half of the EQ section because ConsoleX has a dedicated highpass and lowpass per channel (and a special one for the buss). Except that it’s one third of the EQ section, because ConsoleX also has Stonefire per channel (and on the buss), but you actually already have Stonefire! So you can run that into this and begin to get a handle on what ConsoleX will allow.

Except you actually won’t, because in ConsoleX proper, Stonefire is also a multiband compressor/gate (an extension of what you get in big SSL consoles) in which Parametric (like this, but with a dedicated bass filter) runs parallel around the Stonefire and dynamics. So in that, everything in Parametric will be used as ways of bringing energy and power AROUND the dynamics so the sound opens up way more than you’d get in a real SSL, and then you apply Discontinuity (which you also already have now) to set the overall loudness cues. (oh, and the highpass/lowpass are distributed around all the other stuff so you can use the lowpass for alias-suppression filtering, at 96k or when used in oversampling)

I promise I will explain all this when it’s done. It seems I’ve been working real hard on all this and a lot happens and I’m sure it’s a lot to keep up with. Them’s the risks when you’re trying to not imitate, but outdo the classics. For the time being, Parametric is roughly SSL-style EQ for very detailed tone shaping, in three bands designed to be recognizable to SSL fans except the Low Mid extends into the bass (so I could make sure Parametric works in Airwindows Consolidated, and in the VCV Rack version). The sound is Airwindows-style and I hope it’s useful, but the ranges and resonances of the filters are designed to act something like a big SSL console so if you know to grab for the High Mid control and tighten the bandwidth by turning it left, this acts the same way without ’emulating’ someone else’s property.

I’ll be working behind the scenes for the upcoming week (and spending my livestreams on something chill like minecraft) so that I can drop, not a DSP plugin, but my first fully GUI plugin, Airwindows Meter. If you’ve not been following the development of that, it’s a mighty big deal, and it is the tool by which I can win the loudness war by conclusively showing how to blow way past modern mixing standards through exploiting the same peak energy that everybody ignores, limits and clips away… without even much cost in total loudness. I’ll have examples, instructions, the whole nine yards, and this is not a drill or a joke. It’s time… or, rather, give me a week to prepare, check in on my livestreams if you’d like a sneak peek, and for today, enjoy Parametric. Because the thing is, it’s all part of the same vision, and if you learn how to use Parametric it becomes a tool you can use to do this new kind of mixing, where you can track and control what you’re doing with your peak energy to maximize its effectiveness.

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.

BiquadStack

TL;DW: BiquadStack is a way of making a parametric EQ out of stacked biquad filters.

BiquadStack in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Biquads’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
BiquadStack.zip(519k) standalone(AU, VST2)

There’s already a plugin called BiquadTriple, and it’s three biquads simply cascaded to do what they do with steeper roll-offs before resonance. I’d said ‘this is to let you mock up effects where you’re going to be using filters’ and mentioned ‘ways to make the Q factors more specific and staggered’ but didn’t really go there, at the time.

That time arrived in a hurry when I started really trying to work out what was so special about SSL channel strips, so I could use similar parametric bands in ConsoleX.

So, BiquadStack is out to let you use this right away, without waiting, and see how that goes. The way it works is, it has the same technique used to make very steep Butterworth filters. This is using specific Q factors in combination, so they end up doing a very accurate highpass or lowpass without resonance or irregularities. Typically, when you find this stuff it’s carefully designed to behave correctly, and you can make steep Butterworth filters of whatever order you like, this way.

Using it for bandpasses instead, and adding nonlinearity, gives you a really interesting response: it’s not a narrowing spike as a normal resonant filter would be, instead it’s a little region of intensity that you can bring in or remove. The nonlinearity increases as you add more boost, or stays subtle at lower settings. The edges of the region develop little ‘moats’ to accentuate the effect: some sort of phase interference.

The result is what I wanted: tight and effective parametric EQ which is not ‘analog modeled’, it’s designed to do what I’d WANT to do with analog modeling. It’s about letting through the energy and sonority (or suppressing energy you don’t want) rather than trying to duplicate tone colors of some hardware and muddying things up. This one is full-range, and smoothed, because there’s only one of it: if you want to do sweepy automation things keep it around. There will be more, like a three-band that can fit in Airwindows Consolidated, and the full SSL-style four-band that goes in ConsoleX.

If you want to get a head start on what that will bring you, play with BiquadStack. If you want four bands of it on every channel in your whole mix… well so do I, and I’m working on it :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.

CrunchCoat

TL;DW: CrunchCoat is a cursed retro digital reverb!

CrunchCoat in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
CrunchCoat.zip(561k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Such was the reaction of my livestream as this one came to life. Cursed retro digital is such an evocative term, isn’t it? Gives you an idea of what you’re in store for.

This is no simple bitcrusher. What it’s doing, is taking the existing ClearCoat reverb, a bright-ambiences reverb, into unknown territory through relentless abuse of undersampling. This is a first for me: rather than use undersampling to cleanly deliver appropriate reverb sounds whether at 2x or 4x sample rates, this time we’re just running with that functionality and allowing you to crunch the sample rate down to about 40 hertz, if you like.

What happens to the waveform when you only get a ‘sample’ every now and then? In this case, the plugin interpolates so it’s not all square-wavey. Good news and/or bad news: it’s not doing a clever interpolation. It’s basically drawing straight lines between the points. So, depending on what the reverb’s doing, you can get fairly soft waves… or pointy spikey nastiness. This, combined with the primitive input not-filtering, means you get a LOT of color and texture, but not the texture it was when it started. Instead… well, ‘cursed retro digital’ sums it up. Also, you can wildly pitch-swoop the entire reverb and crank up the regeneration to infinite sustain (or cut it out completely, even more than ClearCoat), which I’m sure nobody is going to use for evil at all.

This will lead to great new things for all my reverbs going forward. But this specific reverb is for only certain people, and you know who you are. Have fun!

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.

Distance3

TL;DW: Distance3 combines the best parts of Distance and Discontinuity.

Distance3 in Airwindows Consolidated(CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Distance3.zip(509k) standalone(AU, VST2)

By request from my livestreams, let’s jump right back into the Discontinuity thing, but this time combined with a much older plugin: the original Distance!

This is a kind of plugin meant to darken the sound and make stuff sound really far away. Originally, I was thinking something that could take all the highs out and accentuate rumble, like turning a sound into the thunder version of itself. And so the first Distance worked basically as an EQ: three stacked stages of processing that combined to make stuff huge, kind of like my monitoring plugin SubsOnly.

Thing is, that doesn’t have any nonlinearities to speak of in it, not the kind that happen in the real world over that much air. And at the time I was working on a Console version called Atmosphere, and thought I had a handle on bringing in that kind of nonlinearity. And so the next one was Distance2… but it lost some of the purity and depth of Distance, but didn’t sound quite the way I wanted. It was the best I could do at the time, and is still there if you’re interested in different sorts of darken/distort.

And then I brought in Discontinuity and was working on it in livestreams and someone mentioned, what if it was part of Distance? And the interesting thing is that Discontinuity also gets its sound from… three stages of processing, stacked. (as in, not side-by-side but in series, one after the other.)

Anytime you look at a situation like that, you can think to yourself: well, I could run these two plugins on after the other, but what if I interleaved the stages? One of Distance, one of Discontinuity, another Distance, another Discontinuity, and so on? Surely that would combine the effects in a more interesting way, merge them into a new distinct thing as they work on each other in turn?

And so here is Distance3. It goes right back to the tone quality of Distance, but it has all of the ‘loud vibe’ from Discontinuity, and outperforms either of them if you need the synthesis of both. There’s probably lots of uses for this and my hope is that it’ll be very easy to find those uses: if a thing has to be convincingly far away and you’ve already got reverb and ambience taken care of, Distance3 should immediately get you there in the best possible way.

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.

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