Airwindows

PowerSag2

TL;DW: PowerSag2 is my improved circuit-starve plugin, now with inverse effect!

This is PowerSag (my circuit-power-supply-starve plugin), but the internals are coded differently for more efficiency on modern CPUs, it gets twice as much maximum effect range (which will help if you’re using it at high sample rates) and it now has an inverse/wet control. That means that you can hear what’s being taken AWAY (which is typically a grungey, gatey effect) and fade into that if it helps you get more meat into some of your sounds.

Expect more innovations like this as I revisit compressy-type effects: it’s a heck of a good feature to add to any dynamics processor. I can’t do ’em all at once (and I’m a bit tapped out keeping up with everything including the Evergreens podcast for patrons) but it’ll keep me busy :)

I’m still here working full-time because of Patreon, otherwise I would have had to stop. Thank you, everyone who’s kicked in to support Airwindows… and everyone who simply gets the word out… and everyone who’s really struggling and can’t afford tools or plugins and who has let ME help YOU. Because that’s really important to me, otherwise I would’ve gone to work at a bank or something :D

Date December 1, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Gringer

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

Gringer.zip(360k)

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

Chris

PowerSag2

Gringer

PocketVerbs

Facet

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The Last Year

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