Airwindows

Gringer

TL;DW: Gringer is a full-wave rectifier plugin, like a Green Ringer guitar effect.

Here’s another no-controls wonder… that ‘models’ an actual obscure guitar effect that also has no controls! And it makes horrible unmusical noises, just like the original obscure effect makes horrible unmusical noises! Whee!

Seriously, though, here’s Gringer. It’s like an emulation of the old Dan Armstrong Green Ringer, kinda. No attempt was made to exactly circuit model anything, but it does the full-wave rectification thing that characterizes this effect, you can bypass it by bypassing the plugin, and it’s got a couple of biquad bandpasses (with VERY wide bandwidth) to mimic having analog circuitry and DC-blocking capacitors on input and output.

Stick it on your guitar solo and see what you get. Please don’t stick it on your mastering console. No good will come of that.

Before I remind people of my Patreon (oops too late) I will remind folks that, though Gringer is pretty useless most of the time, I’ve just released PocketVerbs which was so good people had little to say about it and just began using it in a reverby frenzy. If you missed that, check it out. Oh, and one more thing… I’ve been trying to debug a problem a user’s been having with Monitoring, and I think I’ve got it plus I added one final extra feature… VoiceTrick. Now, if you go to the end of Monitoring, you get the signal turned to mono and then played through the speakers with the phase of one speaker flipped. That way, you can sing into a vocal mic in front of your monitor speakers without using headphones. Be sure and position the mic very exactly between the speakers for the best cancellation! It just seemed to belong in Monitoring. Have fun :)

Date November 24, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

PocketVerbs

TL;DW: PocketVerbs is my popular old special effects reverbs plugin!

PocketVerbs.zip(716k)

And there was much rejoicing. (yaaaaaay!)

Seriously, though, there kind of is. This plugin is a bit of a big deal. It’s been hotly anticipated, and is one of the last two ‘old stock’ plugins (at least, out of my main list) to be brought up to date and ported to VST/Windows/Linux. The other one is Cabs, and I think Cabs isn’t really very good. I’ll put it out anyhow, but I’ve dragged my feet because it’s a pain to work on and it’s not great at ‘being a speaker cab plugin’, not truly special just weird.

But this is PocketVerbs, and PocketVerbs IS special. It’s a precursor to what I’m doing with MV, what I’ll do more of in the future… but the reason I dragged my feet on this one is, it’s cumbersome. There’s more code in it than the size of some novels, and I had to port that! It’s not even brilliant code… but it had to be done just as it was, to maintain the tone qualities PocketVerbs has. It’s huge because it has multiple reverbs to switch between, and the way I implemented that was not easy on me. I’ve honored that in the current version.

You get chambers, rooms, springs. You get a PaulStretch type effect. You get Zarathustra, which is like that but dark and distant and vast. You get a strange gating effect not present in any other plugin, just as it was: this lets you completely and totally reinvent drum sounds even on a stereo mix. It’s a dual-mono design so you get stereo localization out of the space-ified, gated, reinvented drum sounds. Or, you can try whatever other crazy tricks tickle your fancy.

It’s PocketVerbs. It’s here, it’s free, it’s yours. Go bonkers… and have fun. We will both be prayin’ there aren’t bugs as the thing is just about unmaintainable, but it’s working as expected for me. (Catalina MacOS users will of course have to trick or defeat Gatekeeper to use this as Gatekeeper is incompatible with backwards compatability for my plugins, some VST hosts don’t play nicely with the text labels for type of reverb: I’ll try and talk you through any troubles the computer industry inflicts upon you, I’m pretty good with that)

Patreon is how I’m able to scale up and do cooler things with Airwindows. It (as in, you folks, through Patreon) let me get Chord Organ modules for my synth and now I’ll be releasing a new firmware for that (DIYable!) module, hopefully the first of many neat things like that. If you’d buy this plugin for $50, feel free to add that to whatever you’re giving me yearly (it’ll be like the cost of a really good coffee per month) provided that you can afford it, because I don’t want to take your money if you need it more than me. ‘K? That’s important. I think you can see that I’m doing OK now apart from sometimes stressing out too much or working too hard: if I get more money I’ll only do things like buy instruments and sample them and give you the samples.

Stranger things have happened.

Enjoy PocketVerbs :)

Date November 17, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 14 Comments

Facet

TL;DW: Facet is a new kind of hard clip that adds two sharp corners into the wave.

Facet.zip(337k)

Post or die! No food until post! Post is life! I’m super exhausted today, so I hope this makes sense. If not, ask on the Monday livestream.

Facet came out of me trying to come up with a new and distinct kind of distortion for the combined-distortions plugin I’m going to do. Rather than just bring Drive, Density, Spiral, Mojo etc. together, I wanted to add something different.

So, Facet adds a ‘clip point’ but rather than a hard clip it just changes the ‘knee’ of the transfer function so your peaks can still go super high, way beyond 0 dB if you like.

But, they change ‘angle’ at a sharp point which becomes sort of a corner in the sound. Except for high settings it’s both high up in the loudness, and a very gentle ‘corner’: still sharp, but very little change.

And down near zero, it’s damn near total hard clipping. At silence, it literally is a hard clip to silence.

Aw hell. Play with it, see what you think. i can’t explain this one well, at least not right now. The mad scientist labs have released another weird one. It will act like it’s a hard clip or a semi-dirty saturation, except the range of adjustment acts different, and it’ll throw an odd artifact on pure low-frequency tones… just play with it, see what you get. It will find its way into the combined plugin because it’s got a flavor all its own, but I can’t describe it today.

I’ve survived this long on Patreon and most likely will still do so even if I don’t beat myself into the ground making new posts and plugins, but part of it is because I’ve had the opportunity to up my game quite a bit, and it’s meant weeks of nonstop work on stuff that isn’t plugins. I’m sure it’ll get easier in time :)

Date November 10, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

ToMono

TL;DW: ToMono (LeftoMono and RightoMono) copy one channel to both, losslessly.

ToMono.zip(655k)

Time for another tiny utility plugin or two!

LeftoMono or RightoMono exist for only one purpose: if your input is either left or right, it’s coming in on a stereo channel, and you have no use for the other side.

No, worse: you’re coming off some kind of camera or camcorder and the other side is not only ‘nothing’, it shows some noise or interference that’s actively bad. In those situations you are often given the option, ‘Convert to mono?’ but doing that will combine the real signal with the garbage, interference, not-really-clean-silence signal.

And so, ToMono. They do exactly what the name suggests. There’s nothing to them, no controls or UI of any kind, you don’t need to open any interface or do anything. Instantiate the one you need and boom: you are now copying the input data words from the side you want, to the side you don’t. Pure cloned mono of the highest possible quality in a single plugin. And since it’s so simple it’ll work in places like OBS where maybe sometimes they don’t handle generic VSTs properly or generate controls: hey, none needed!

This is a super boring plugin… except when you need it most. Hope you like it. (I no longer need it as I’m running my lav into the real mixing board… but I used LeftoMono last week, before putting it out. It can’t save the camera from other issues like robot-voice over HDMI, but it rescued me from the ‘interference and bad silence’ extra stereo channel. :)

Airwindows is supported by Patreon. That’s how I’m still here, I get to throw Patreon money at gear (including gear I hope to emulate in future or study technically) and it’s very much appreciated. Thank you :)

Date November 3, 2019
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Chris

Gringer

PocketVerbs

Facet

ToMono

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The Last Year

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