Airwindows

Dark (Redux)

TL;DW: Dark is a wordlength reducer that gives your music a blacker backdrop.

Since it’s only been two weeks, here’s an update-in-place! As in, this is what the plugin should have been.

Dark Redux is Dark, exactly as before, BUT now it has one added control. DeRez! Just like in the DeRez plugin, it zooms seamlessly down to 1 (or 0) bits. It’s continuous, not discrete: you can do one and a half bits or whatever, play it by ear. Except that unlike the DeRez plugin, it’s still Dark… so you can hear more clearly what the new wordlength reducer is doing.

It defaults to 0, which is exactly as it was before. Both the 24 and 16 bit settings derez, which means you can take it to 0 bit (silence) with 16 bit, switch to 24 bit, and the result is you’re listening to 8 bit. (if you need really specific behavior, you can use BitShiftGain before and after the plugin to get exact bit values).

This makes it possible to do old school sampling effects, dark bitcrushed sounds. It also demonstrates that the Dark algorithm is a bit special, because you have to really trash the wordlength to deteriorate the tone much. It’s more like a slightly noisier, slightly funkier, slightly gated grunge tone, even though the output is literally just bitcrushing. There isn’t even any smoothing applied to get the ‘dark’ tonality, it’s literally all a wordlength reducer, and with DeRez at 0 it’s exactly the original Dark plugin.

If there’s a problem or if you need to not see a control marked ‘DeRez’, my updates-in-place always leave the original file there, in this case renamed to DarkOriginal.zip(338k). They have the same ID and DAWs ought to be able to handle swapping the new one in, even on existing projects that use Dark, it’s just to make sure people can get back the original release if they ever need to.

This work is supported by Patreon. I hope you like it. :)

Date June 14, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

AverMatrix

TL;DW: AverMatrix turns averaging into a full-featured EQ.

AverMatrix.zip(344k)

Here’s a good idea, by request!

My Average plugin is pretty handy. It gives you from one to ten taps of simple averaging, as a continuously variable thing. At higher settings, there are comb-filtery artifacts that come in as a result of how averaging works, but you can tune them with the filter setting and they sound pretty natural… and averaging has very good time response because it doesn’t have an IIR ‘tail’, so it’s very clean-sounding in ways normal filters aren’t.

AverMatrix takes that, and gives you one to ten POLES of filtering like in the first Average. That’s continuous too: you can have three and a half poles, no trouble (it just generates the third pole and then fades halfway into it) so the subtlety of adjustment is great.

AND, also by request, AverMatrix uses the Inv/Dry/Wet trick some of my other plugins use, and it’s a great idea to include. Go to full ‘inverse’ and AverMatrix is made to keep the dry and subtract the inverted wet from it… which means, now it’s a highpass. An amazing-sounding highpass, with great clarity and airy-ness and just as clean transient behavior, and just like applying dry/wet on the regular averaging, you can apply dry/inverse to give only a subtle treble lift. I think this is going to work real well for people. And one more thing: since native averaging at high numbers of taps gives a funny notch that you can tune, and since this is inverse, you can use this behavior to give a highs boost with a funny, tuneable peak. Set it wrongly and maybe it’ll make your mic sound nasty (don’t reinforce existing spikes in the mic’s response) but place it just right and you can get treble lift that neatly avoids the resonances of your mic… and enjoy the response of a much fancier microphone. (your settings will be sample-rate dependent so tune it again if you change sample rate)

All this is supported by Patreon, so the plugin is free for you to use with my blessing. In fact, so’s the source code (MIT license). If AverMatrix is indispensable for you, so you’d have bought it if I was selling it for $20, you can go to Patreon and add $20 per year to whatever you’re giving me (if anything). If so many people do this that I break $2000 a month (back in the day selling these commercially I often made that much, but it was real inconsistent) then I have a goal in mind: I will begin reselling electronic parts (IC chips, capacitors, trimpots, circuit board material) to people so you can begin trying to build your own synths and stompboxes and things. I’m working on replicating my modular system as a pile of DIY parts people can have for very cheaply, and as you know I find strange and new ways to do things, so this is going to be pretty exciting.

I’ll also see anyone who cares to show up, at my Monday Q&A session at 11:00 EST on my youtube channel: we’ll be talking about what I mentioned at the end of the video. I think it would be good if I moved my music jams to a more Europe-friendly time: 3:00 PM my time, which is 9 in the evening in Europe, and go for three hours instead of nearly two… because that way I can build up a schedule that I can promote and let people sign up for, like a residency, so that a synth-music listener can look up the schedule and (eventually) always have somewhere to go, every day, any time of day or night, to find live music they can listen to.

They call it Streampunks, and I’m thrilled to have found that scene. And it’ll be Colin Benders rules as well as Chris from Airwindows rules: from me, I’ll be looking for people who are willing to show up and stream when they say they will. I’m not so worried about skill levels or anything, because this is about ‘just doing’ and appreciating everyone, and because of the Colin Benders rules ;) though it’s not spelled out, anyone who’s been following Colin’s music streaming adventures knows that Colin rules are ‘there are no genres, there are no rules’. So it could be bangin’ intense underground club fodder, or meditative ambient chill spaces, or pretty much anything: don’t get trapped, don’t get predictable or play to expectations.

We’ll talk Monday about what I can do to set up a sort of venue (really, a schedule, as I’m not the boss of anybody but I can provide a certain amount of promotion plus I already stream regularly, have for years). IF anyone can do it better or take it over, that would be exciting too! But it ain’t happening yet, so I mean to kick this thing into motion, and anybody who can stream live music and explore their own creativity is welcome.

Thanks! See some of you on Monday, and talk to you later :)

Date June 7, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Dark

TL;DW: Dark is a wordlength reducer that gives your music a blacker backdrop.

Dark.zip(338k)

Some weeks are MY kind of fun…

This won’t make big changes in your audio. In fact if you think you can reliably hear this on its HD setting, I think you’re mistaken. And yet, this might be the funnest thing I’ve done all year.

Why? Because I’m back to the dithers again. I figured out a way (or two) to go EVEN FARTHER in the direction I’d chosen. And it worked: it worked super well, and you can have it. Introducing Airwindows Dark.

How does it work? It’s very simple, really. Much like Not Just Another Dither (NJAD, my previous best) it analyzes the results of the audio, depending on whether the dither rounds up or down. With correct TPDF dither, it’s a factor of randomness, a noise that breaks up patterns in the output. With NJAD, it runs a Benford Realness calculation and uses that (for a more natural-sounding audio output). But Dark?

It simply works out the average trajectory of where the audio’s going. It’s following the lower frequencies, suppressing the highs. And then it makes its choice based solely on whatever is going to further this trajectory… and keep the output as smooth as possible. It is ‘dithering’ with intent, doing whatever it has to in order to get a darker, softer output. All done by truncation alone.

The result is delightful, if you are into analog sonics and the absence of bright digital artifacts and hisses. It is NOT obvious, unless 16 bit artifacts are already obvious to you, and at HD (24 bit) it is purely a matter of thoroughness and making correct choices and you shouldn’t be hearing a difference. You damn sure won’t be able to blind test a difference (that requires much more obvious stuff happening).

But, but, but! If your experience with audio (and probably loud listening levels, and REALLY good monitoring, and amazing source files) involves sinking into a lush bed of analog-rich sonics, where you quickly notice subtle shifts in sonic attitude and then take much longer to get used to them and form your judgements… there’s nothing at all like this.

It can only wordlength reduce, so especially at 24 bit it shouldn’t be able to ever hurt bright sounds that are supposed to be there. It’s only dithering (in a novel way). But it’s doing its thing in a way that’s completely outside of anything you can do with filtering or normal processing. If you need depth and space, if you need rich black silence behind your mix, this beats NJAD… soundly.

I hope you like it. The demonstration at 8 bit wordlength in the video ought to show you what to expect. Dark is yours to use (in fact, you can have the source code under the MIT license!). For now, if you are using Monitoring you’ll need to switch it off to use Dark, as Monitoring defaults to a 24 bit wordlength reduction using NJAD and I’m not prepared to simply update it and have it default to Dark for all things.

Though I’m tempted. ;)

This work is supported by Patreon. Which is going quite nicely, so I’m preparing for another phase: if I break $2000 a month, anything beyond that goes to buying DIY synth hardware (perfboard, CMOS chips, etc) which I will then resell at cost… MY cost. So I’ll be making chips available at 39 or 20 cents each and putting together kits to get people started, and each month I’ll send out stuff for people to play with, until I’ve reached the budget for that month. I may or may not charge shipping: haven’t decided. So if you think it would be good to start your own maker business and could use a cheap source of parts, the better I do the more likely you’ll be able to get your hands on electronics parts (and I will say where I’m getting stuff, if you need to order your own at normal prices: but I’ll be selling stuff at MY cost, no mark-up). I will also be writing up DIY guides and instructions, and doing videos and instagram posts about all this. That’s a new goal, because if I do better for myself I intend to spread it around in significant ways :)

Date May 31, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

Chrome Oxide

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

ChromeOxide.zip(356k)

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

Chris

Dark (Redux)

AverMatrix

Dark

Chrome Oxide

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club