Airwindows

Making LUTs with Chris from Airwindows

Here’s something a bit different!

LUTs are LookUp Tables for camera adjusting, video making… all sorts of things. And you can use them in the video streaming software I use, OBS (and in many other places!)

I’d been seeing a wild video effect in the Buchla videos of Kevin Rix, and was trying to track down how he did it. Outboard video synthesizers? And then it hit me… LUTs! I figured he was making really wild, aggressive LUTs and applying them to just whatever video footage he had. And I began to experiment…

Here’s the first official result. Airwindows Psych LUTs. This is a set of LUTs that will give you very plausible ‘psychedelic’ effects, like they were a set of lens filters you can apply. There’s a whole series, from 2 to 64: they’re based on ‘posterize’ effects, so higher numbers mean more subtlety and lower numbers are more aggressive. These bridge the gap between wild color effects and high quality video.

The video walks you through how I made the set, and produces a series of different wild effects LIVE ON CAMERA, often of visual stunts on the reference image that I then apply live to the video as it’s being made. Fun is had by all! And depending on how well you get along with free image editors (and what options they’ve got for editing), you can do every bit of it with FREE software. And you can have the Airwindows PsychLUTs free as well, saving you the trouble of coming up with your own (which you should also do).

All this is supported by Patreon, and though you should take care of yourself first, giving me money clearly only encourages me :D so, you’re going to see more creative tools of ALL sorts being shared and given away here. I get to give you all the tools I can think up, because I don’t have to take money for the tools. People chip in to keep me cranking away on all this stuff full-time, and some bits are a lot of fun. Learning the ways of LUTs is great fun, especially if you mean to make music videos… here’s stuff you can use even if you don’t have a budget. I’ll make more :)

Date April 26, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Tape (Redux)

TL;DW: Tape needed to get improved. So now it is!

Tape.zip(382k)

For a plugin that’s supposed to be the simplest, easiest, least fussy and most ultimate tape mojo ever, this sure has been through a lot of changes.

First, it came out with a quirk of level setting, where the gain trim didn’t work exactly like just altering gain into the ‘tape’. That got updated. Then, the head bump was too much for many people: really a pretty significant boost on some sounds. So, this Redux is updating that plugin in place (the new version will outright replace the previous one, discard or overwrite the previous wherever you’ve got it) to add what people needed so badly, in spite of my need to keep it almost control-less: a head bump control.

Now, if you crank to 1.0 you get exactly what the previous version was. (If you need to match earlier mixes you can do it this way: just set Bump to 1.0 and you have exactly the previous plugin.) If you turn it to 0, you get the head bump completely removed. It’s like an upgraded version of FromTape in this setting, where you have tone softening/shaping but absolutely no bass bump. And if you leave it at its default of 0.5, I think THAT ought to work for people as the ‘don’t touch anything’, no-fiddling way to mix to Airwindows Tape.

This is meant to be the best. I think people were right about the bass being too much… it was pretty much exactly twice as much as it should’ve been. So, course corrected: now it’s the ultimate. (Tape is of course like the latest ToTape, but it leaves off ‘flutter’ and such things that real tape also tries to avoid, it’s totally current in terms of dithering to the floating point buss etc. and it uses Spiral internally rather than Density, for an even more transparent and analog-like sound than any previous Airwindows tape emulation)

Hope ya like it.

Oh, one more thing: as mentioned in the last bit of the video, I’m working on things like LUTs and visual arts, in Airwindows style. So I’ve developed a LUT that fixes my GH5 camera so it renders super-intense watercolor pigments without blowing them out with too much saturation. I think the result looks very filmlike and natural, and a LUT pack will be coming out as soon as I have some crazier ones done for music video purposes… but part of the idea was to make a simple image that had colors on it (slightly blurred) that I could sample in a paint program like Clip Studio Paint. I have done this, so in advance of the fancy hi-tech LUT stuff, here’s the picture: Watercolor Pigments. It’s not meant to be perfectly sharp, it’s meant to have the COLORS as good as I could get ’em, including a number of color mixes done in real pigments (should also work pretty well mixing ’em in multiply mode to emulate watercolor layering).

All this is supported by Patreon, which is going very well. So maybe you aren’t interested in non-plugin things, but so long as I can keep the plugins coming, it pleases me to also give out other things. And if you do find the other things useful, so much the better. One thing about it, if I was working as a normal plugin business I wouldn’t have the freedom to do all this other stuff, and so it seems natural to share all of it, as much as I can. In future you’ll see other products of everything from LUTs for video-making, to synth hardware-hacking DIY projects, to workflows for doing animation lip-sync. It’s all me doing all of it, so it takes a very long time to get stuff done ‘cos I fit it in around all the plugins, but quarantine has given me just a bit more time to dive deep into all this stuff I do, and I am seizing the opportunity :)

Date April 19, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 12 Comments

Distortion

TL;DW: Distortion is a slightly dark analog-style distortion with several presets, like Focus.

Distortion.zip(357k)

I think this one ought to go over well. People often want ‘analog-style distortion’. Here’s a collection of Airwindows distortion algorithms in a handy plugin with a new twist: it’s optimized for high sample rate in an innovative way.

What does that mean? Distortion is a slightly ‘dark’ distortion plugin. Not only are the algorithms pretty smooth (with some exceptions: check the end of the video for one!), it uses sample averaging to stop extreme highs from getting through. At 44.1k, there’s an averaging stage before the distortion, darkening the output but also interfering with aliasing. Averaging also has some tonal benefits to midrange and bass, so this gives the plugin more of a ‘voice’. That’s at 44.1k, CD quality.

But, if you use higher rates like 96k or 192k, Distortion begins to use more ‘poles’ of simple averaging. It’ll bring in averaging after the distortion, softening the tone. It’ll use more and more stages of this treble-softening, still always on just the most recent two samples, even though that becomes more and more finely grained as the sample rate goes up. Because of how averaging works, this never brings in weird notches or cancellations (like broader averages) but it does produce a sort of bleed-off of highs. Run at 44.1k this would give you an increasingly wide roll-off.

At the high sample rates this was designed for, what you get instead is exactly the same ‘dark distortion’ tonality, but increasingly better aliasing rejection as the sample rate goes up. I think 96k is a sweet spot for this: at 96k, still a basically normal sample rate, you get extremely warm and fluid distortion, even when pushed to extremes.

If you like extremes, look into the final two distortion modes. In Distortion, the modes Mojo and Dyno operate in their purest form, where the distortion shape can curl around again to produce strange effects if you slam them ruthlessly. In the video you see me discovering this on Mojo, running a simple DI bass at far too high a volume into Mojo, and then doubling it up to make crazy organic synth-like effects. Other modes like Density, Drive or Spiral will just go to ultra-clipping normally.

Distortion will give you truly warm overdrive effects, especially at high sample rates, without a bunch of fake analog modeling. I don’t recommend using it on everything (because maybe some sounds are good WITH extended high-end, especially if you’re working at 96k and all) but as always, I’m not the boss of you.

My work is supported by Patreon, and that’s why I’m still here putting out new plugins. Since they’re open source that means others can build upon them (such as a recent project where someone is doing the VCV rack versions for me: thanks!) and I’ll keep making them as long as my power’s on. See ya on the live streams :)

Date April 12, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Airwindows Plugins Starter Kit

StarterKit.zip(6.0M)

This is the Airwindows Plugin Starter Kit. It contains 11 plugins (if you count Console as its own kind of plugin) and you should be able to make ’em do just about anything musical you could want. This includes many forms of ‘analog emulation’ and a great deal of creative mix exploration. There’s a video explaining many things you can do, and I’ve got two tracks up on SoundCloud (featured at the top of the page) that demonstrate a heavy rock song mixed entirely on my fully analog system (MOTU>Heritage Audio>Heritage Audio hardware buss comp>Lavry ADC) and then the same thing done entirely ITB using the Starter Kit (not even all the plugins). It’s not meant to be an utter and exact clone, but the Starter Kit is basically just as good as the expensive analog rig tonally, even on a mix designed to get the most out of the analog approach (no sound is so much as touched digitally in the analog mix: it’s basically using Logic as an iZ RADAR)

The downloads of the full songs are FLACs of the 24/96, on the one hand the raw capture from the Lavry and on the other hand a simple bounce from Logic using the Starter Kit. So if you want to subject these claims to extreme scrutiny, that’s possible. (maybe I should have a mix-off and put the Logic project file up somewhere: a mix-off where you can ONLY use the Starter Kit. We can see how extreme the variations can become!)

These are the plugins included in the Starter Kit: the video goes into detail on why these perhaps audacious choices were made. It’s not arbitrary: this is meant to serve professionals and also to guide newbies towards mix enlightenment.

EQ: Baxandall, Capacitor2, Focus
Dynamics: Pressure5, ClipOnly2, DeBess
Utility: PurestGain, Monitoring
Analogifying: Interstage
Ambience: Galactic, Verbity
Console System: Console7Buss, Console7Channel, Console7Cascade

(edit: I have added Channel9! Consider it as part of the Analogifying category :) )

If you’ve never gotten into Airwindows Console, or Airwindows Plugins, this is the time. I’m demoing this kit on Logic Pro X, which is now available from Apple on a 90-day free trial, but the plugins are provided in signed AU and VST2.4 form for Mac, Windows64 and Linux (x86 and ARM64 for Raspberry Pi). It shouldn’t be that hard to translate everything I’m doing to any DAW that supports generic-interface plugins. Most importantly, if you looked over the hundreds of plugins Airwindows produces, and wondered where on earth to start, here is your answer! Start here.

Note there are no tape plugins or any name-brand ’emulations’ of anything. You should not be starting with that stuff. Fight me :D

If you have other questions you can post to this thread about the Starter Kit, or show up to a Monday Q&A session, or get in touch with me some other way and I’ll try to help. The Starter Kit is meant to be very approachable, so it should help you start to get pleasing results provided you know what kinds of sounds you want to make! :)

All this is made possible by my Patreon. If it turns out that these free and open source plugins help you out a lot, and especially if you start wanting other more special-purpose ‘kits’ or still more plugins, you might want to support my Patreon! That’s how I’m able to do this full-time.

Thank you, and I hope you enjoy the Airwindows Plugins Starter Kit! If you want more plugins, there are hundreds, but this is a good start. If you need the original version of the starter kit, before the signed plugins and all, it can still be downloaded at OldStarterKit.zip(5.6M)

Date April 8, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 11 Comments

Chris

Making LUTs with Chris from Airwindows

Tape (Redux)

Distortion

Airwindows Plugins Starter Kit

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club