Airwindows

Chrome Oxide

TL;DW: Chrome Oxide is an alternate path to vibey old tape sonics.

Never can tell what’s going to turn up in the weekly plugins…

I’ve been getting asked for this one. It’s a re-release, like some of these Character plugins, and there are times when I hasten to add that the old stuff isn’t really special, it’s just that I’ve released so much and people do want some of the quirky old stuff but I don’t recommend it…

Well! Not this time.

Chrome Oxide was an experiment, one that didn’t go further than this. It is a dual-band tape emulation, where the lows are a bit saturated but the highs are delayed by a random noise warble that can also be biased to delay them a bit further. My pursuits of tape emulation have always gone toward the ‘BETTER than digital’ direction, where I tried to capture the magic without diving into the audio degradation.

But revisiting Chrome Oxide (and re-releasing it, with modern wordlength handling etc and dithering to the floating point output buss) showed me a plugin that excels at some tonalities I didn’t even know about when I made it. For instance, your Boards of Canada type stuff, mulch-core audio where it sounds like it’s coming off an old Walkman or Wollensack? This will not do crazy pitch wobbles or dropouts… but you can instantly, effortlessly get the tone of it. The intensity controls a noise effect that is FM, frequency modulating the highs against the lows. Bias further delays the highs, and this sculpts the phase aberrations of the output and the flavor of roll-off… so, without ever getting aggressive or obvious, you can just dial-a-mulch and go as fuzzy and old-sounding as you like, but musically. It is subtle enough to use on anything and aggressive enough to completely change the mood of a track.

And now you can have it. Mulch away! You don’t have to obliterate a track to get into the vibe you crave. (and of course some people hate this sort of thing: if you doubly hate this one, I’ll know I’ve done it right :D )

This work is supported by Patreon, which is useful at times like this: I’ve been so busy doing Chord Organ firmware, making Teensy boards run at 340khz audio, drawing up chord charts and working on music theories, that it’s taken me this long to do Chrome Oxide. But here it is: if I’d known it was this good I’d have done it sooner, I like the styles of music that do this (hadn’t even heard of them when Chrome Oxide was originally made). You don’t have to join the Patreon to use these plugins: I’m doing good and want you to take care of yourself first, you can SEE I’m doing good, the work is going great. But if you want to support this work or enable ever-grander stuff for me to do, you can join the Patreon for $20 a year for each plugin you can’t do without (or less, or nothing: whatever! I just want to put it in a context people understand). When you leave, you keep the plugins, and in fact you get the source code and can make your own plugins and even sell ’em so long as you credit me as the MIT license requires. Top that, competing subscription services :D

Date May 24, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Elation

TL;DW: Elation is a re-release of another old Character plugin. This is the one that’s not really a compressor! :D

Elation

Back with a plugin! (I know it’s usually literally every week, but I’ve been fooling around with things like Eurorack module firmwares so here we are again)

This is Elation, which is NOT REALLY a sort of LA-2A like thing. That’s because it builds a distinct sound out of LA-2A convolution impulses, makes it already not an LA-2A, and then doesn’t properly compress :D it does something, but it doesn’t count as compressing. I’m not sure what I was up to here.

But it’s got the Character plugin ‘character slider’ that lets you greatly accentuate the tonal effect (this is another one that steals bass if that interests you) and a drive slider that lets you crunch things, and unlike typical plugins it has a dry/wet on the top for some reason! So, if you’re looking for a ‘analog-ifier’ based on dynamic convolution that can hype up a sound in an interesting way, and it’s important to you that you use something other people won’t have or aren’t using, this is your silver bullet: like the other Character plugins, it’s a weird secret weapon that won’t sound like other peoples’ plugin chains. If you can work with what this one has, then you can bring a bit of color that people won’t have constantly heard. And that’s why I’m digging through the most obscure backwaters of my plugin library to VST-ify everything.

And the reason I’m still here and able to do that, rather than being compelled to stick to what is sensible and saleable, is that Airwindows is supported by Patreon! It really is a model that works for what I do: that’s why I can do things like write firmwares for eurorack modules one week, then put out some subtlety like PurestFade, or release an oddity like Elation that would never survive in a commercial context. Patreon means that I can put out the really obscure stuff and not worry about whether every new plugin has to ring the cash register bells. And then when I come up with one that does… it’s still free and open source, because that’s how I roll.

Talk to you later… or on Monday: currently I am livestreaming Q&A on Mondays at 11:00 EST, and then at the same time I’m playing music for a couple hours on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. That way I can do my thing and then hand any listeners I get over to Colin Benders, who is exploring exactly the sorts of things I enjoy on a much bigger and fancier modular system. I will be unwinding after my streams by listening to Colin’s, and I’m hanging out on his Modular Mayhem Discord server in case anyone wants to catch up with me in chat!

Date May 17, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Airwindows Chord Organ Firmware Redux

Three hours of video explaining my updated Chord Organ Firmware, which is HERE!
AirwindowsChordOrgan.zip(94k)

This time, the mic worked and this marathon masterclass in all things Chord Organ is strongly recommended for Eurorack DIYers and synth enthusiasts! It’s basically a total braindump in the current state of the art for procedural chord structure generation, with a huge pile of tips and tricks. This is the evolution of the modular synth jams I’ve been doing for years, and I give every secret and concept away <3

Time for bed now. It’s all in the video. Everything is footnoted for quick reference (which took many hours) so here you go, nothing more for me to say. Enjoy the masterclass, now or for future reference and all your Chord Organ needs :)
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Date May 10, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

PurestFade

TL;DW: PurestFade is just like PurestGain, but with a MUCH smoother fade control.

PurestFade.zip(342k)

This is a plugin for one person.

Okay, it’s a plugin that EXISTS because one person asked the right thing at the right time. A mastering engineer emailed me and said, PurestGain is great, it’s just perfect, everything I need except… when I do fades with it, there’s a discontinuity when I go from 0.001 volume on the Slow Fade, to 0. It cuts out abruptly, and that’s a problem. Can you help?

I can!

Thing is, PurestGain is designed so you can whack that control around aggressively. It doesn’t mute instantly, but you can kill a track real fast in a mix, gracefully, without zipper noise. PurestGain is correct for some users. If you needed to have a control on some kind of USB controller, like a NanoKontrol or something (say you’re doing an automation pass) you might well need to trim the overall gain with the top slider, and then assign the hardware controller to the bottom slider and automate. It’ll smooth out the incoming MIDI data and the result will be dynamic and aggressive, will feel like you’re yanking faders around on a real board. That’s the design intent for the ballistics of PurestGain.

PurestFade is totally different. If you are at full crank and snap it instantly to zero, you’ll get an automated fade of about eight seconds or so. It gets subtler and subtler the quieter you go, until at the point of silence you literally can’t mess up the fade: it will always smooth out the last tiny bit.

If you drag it slower than ten seconds you can do any slowness of fade you want, smooth as you like. And, an interesting thing is that if you need a faster fade than the automatic one (of just going fully to zero in an instant and letting the plugin do it) what you can do is manually drag it down faster than that. It’ll chase your fade speed, which means if you’re doing an unnaturally fast fade it’ll be trying to smooth you out a bit but it will let you do that. I think it’s the ultimate smoothed fade.

And, in mixing (since it’s still PurestGain at heart) I think you can decide which you prefer, and if you’ve got a style then you know which one is right for you. Probably won’t be both. If you need to do abrupt, dynamic things it’s PurestGain you’ll want… but if your fader moves are generally more subtle, invisible, then you’re probably going to always want PurestFade for everything. (The top control will still give you more rapid moves if you need them)

Which one is the right one for you? Most likely you already know which one you’ll be using, just from the descriptions.

All this is supported by Patreon, which makes so many things possible. I’ve got an update on the Chord Organ firmware I made, and I should be able to do a better video: I’ll test the new firmware out Tuesday and Wednesday, and then if all goes well I’ll have a video that demonstrates all the new things you can do with the new firmware, and explains the underlying tech better. And then I’ll get back to plugins, which are never far from my sight :)

Date May 3, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 9 Comments

Chris

Chrome Oxide

Elation

Airwindows Chord Organ Firmware Redux

PurestFade

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club