Airwindows

DeEss

TL;DW: DeEss is the best de-essing solution there is. A go-to utility plugin.

Now it can be told: I’m just back from PatreCon! I’ll have more of that (probably just on my website and youtube, as it won’t be a product release) but let’s just say: what I’m doing with Airwindows has powerful motives. I want to give people the ability to do their music and production, I want to give both the popular and unpopular tools so you can express yourself regardless of your resources or whether you’re niche or mainstream or WHATEVER. It’s important enough to me that I don’t care what it costs me, and I mean to do it right: it’s the right thing, for the right reasons, with the right determination, and I’m setting it up (with the open source) so it can’t be taken away. You’ll be able to have stability in your production life, and pick out stuff you can count on that won’t go wrong on you, letting you have control of your musical world. In a very real sense you own that (heck, you own the source code).

Turns out, I chose well when I chose Patreon for handling this, my life work. To some people you could paint me in a nice (perhaps over-nice, hard to credit) light by saying ‘oh, Chris is kind of like Jack Conte the founder and CEO of Patreon’. It tells a story though it also implies I’m set up for some kind of epic success story and sounds like hype.

But for you guys, you kinda know about ME and not necessarily Patreon: you do that because I ask you to, but you maybe don’t know Jack about Jack, or why it would matter. You want plugins, and you’ve got to know how I am because I keep making them for you. However, I went to Patrecon (big gamble, wrecked my finances real good) because I wanted to hear what Jack Conte talks about in private, get a sense of what Patreon’s really like, maybe even talk to him and see if he hears me, gets what I’m about. It could have been a mistake for me: I could’ve gone and found they didn’t really care, just wanted my fees and were watching to see if I became big enough to get behind.

It wasn’t a mistake, it was one of the most brilliant ideas I ever had, and I ran with it by doing some of the most terrifying stuff I’ve ever done. I told Sam and Jack (Sam Yam is the OTHER co-founder) about how I got to go see my Dad before he died thanks to still running Airwindows. And I doubled down and thought out some ideas about what Patreon means in practice, and I went and pitched those same guys on these ideas, knowing that I am just a broke 50-year-old with no health care and no credentials for counseling Silicon Valley founders. Turns out I saw Jack’s keynote… his PRIVATE keynote, the one where he asked people not to record it this time because he was going to get extra real… and he was already leaning towards the direction I saw. And I took him further along that path.

They got it. Seriously, they got it.

I can’t tell you everything (and none of it involves me no longer needing you; nobody’s offering to make me a silicon valley guy nor was I asking to be one: that is NOT what this is about and I wasn’t asking Jack for money or even promo) but what I can tell you is, turns out Jack Conte is a guy like ME, and that means very specific things. And what he’s doing with Patreon in general is very akin to what I’m doing with Airwindows, and he is every bit as brave as I am. I believe it’s gonna work, and that it matters: it matters hugely. I’m going to do everything I can to help Jack after what I privately heard at PatreCon, and if you’re a musician or producer also on Patreon I want to help you, too, ‘cos we’re very much all in this together.

Okay. DeEss.

If you need the best DeEsser, and especially if you know how to use them, this is the one you want: full stop. It’s the best one, it’s simple and quick to use and now it’s entirely free. It’s MIT license open source, so now everybody can ‘steal’ it. There’s a guy making GUI skinning tech for plugins, and he has the code for it: you’ll be able to use it and make whatever GUI skin you want on it, pay the (GUI) guy to sell that, or GPL it and use his (and my) tech free.

The Airwindows DeEss works by tracking slew rates, not by filtering and frequencies. It keeps a string of recent slew rates, and if it sees high slews that keep going back and forth (flipping direction) that’s how it triggers. It doesn’t trigger on things like square wave or sawtooth waves, because those aren’t going back and forth fast enough to be an ess. It’s purely mechanical: the trigger for DeEss happens instantly and way more powerfully on real esses, making it extremely easy to set. It’s not fiddly, just crank up the effect so you can plainly hear where it hits and use that (don’t overtrigger, for the bad esses you’ll get a HUGE powerful trigger even when everything else is totally clear of de-essing)

Then you use the ducking control and the treble rolloff to tailor the kind of esses you do want. The tone thing lets you have darker esses that are still very audible, and the ducking control means you can retain the original sound but duck it as much as you like. It should be possible to template it: since it triggers so powerfully on real esses, if you’ve got a working setting it should always work. De-essing is now a solved problem, for good. Use good taste (avoid ‘lisping’ effects) and de-essing is easy.

I already mentioned Patreon, so I think we’re good. I use that to live. I hope you like DeEss :)

Date November 5, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 30 Comments

ADT

TL;DW: ADT is a double short delay tap with saturation.

ADT

ADT means ‘artificial double-tracking’. You could also call it fixed flanging. It’s a single short delay, as heard on lots of Beatles tracks. It’s now my job to explain what’s different about the Airwindows ADT, what you can do with it beyond the obvious ‘stick it on like a preset and pretend you are a Beatle’, and why you’d bother.

With the Airwindows ADT, you get two delay taps (making it A3T?) and an important feature: the mix sliders used to apply the delayed taps are ‘attenuverters’. That’s a word from Modular Synthesizer Land, which means you get both output level control and the ability to invert the output. Here’s why that matters.

If you apply a fixed delay tap, you get an effect called ‘comb filtering’ where you’re emphasizing and cancelling frequencies based on how long the delay is. You’d think that would sound really strange, but it’s the same way you hear a direct sound and also the sound bouncing off a floor or wall: we naturally hear through comb filtering rather well, which is why room design is important in studio control rooms. (you could have a bass frequency getting cancelled, be unable to hear it at all at your listening position, and yet things will still sound perfectly normal.) Applying a quick delay like this can make your sound richer and more textural, and a little more ambient. If it’s a very short delay it may not be heard as an echo at all.

But, if you’re using an INVERTED delay tap, something else happens: the shorter the delay and the closer to the volume of the dry signal, the more it’ll cancel out the bass. You’ll still get all the comb filtering effects, but you’ll also be removing lows, either the deep lows or even low midrange if the delay’s really short.

If you blend two taps that are both inverted, you can cut bass while averaging out the comb-filter effects. If the taps are in phase (not inverted) what you’re doing is reinforcing the bass, because the cancellation effects will run out below a certain frequency and just add together. All this is using very quick delays, though ADT lets you lengthen them to where they’re slapbacks. Don’t be too distracted by that, part of what makes ADT its own effect is the ability to shape the tone with delays too quick to hear as echoes.

Finally, now that you know you can cut bass using these very quick delays, or reinforce it, or any combination you like… there’s a headroom control. ADT will distort like crazy using low headroom. That can be used as a distortion effect… but it’s not just ordinary distortion, it’s a combination of Spiral into Console5’s buss (PurestConsole, for clarity and well-behavedness). These don’t perfectly cancel out. Instead, it produces a slightly leaned-out, skinnier tone to complement the way ADT fattens things up. If you’re using it to thin bass, it’ll be even more effective. If you’re reinforcing the body of the sound, it’ll color things in a subtle but interesting way. And of course if you love it, you can set up mixes that way (swap out Console5Channel for original Spiral, either on mix elements you’d like a little thinner and more energetic, or the whole thing). Sometimes there are new types of coloration that owe nothing to EQ or traditional processing: this is one of those times.

I’m supported in these experiments by Patreon, and that’s how I’m able to be still doing this every week. I’d like you to think of all these plugins as free, but pretend that some of the coolest ones are $50 to own forever (complete with source code and lifetime support). Sound reasonable-ish? Turns out that ‘the coolest plugins’, the ones that cost $50, are entirely up to you. If you find those ones you depend on and use like the forever-plugins they are, get on the Patreon and pledge the equivalent of $50 a year, or $100 if you depend on two, and so on. Then, next year, see if there are more. So long as I make at least one plugin a year that people love (doesn’t have to be the same one for everyone) then I can make as many as 52 for everyone to have, and there’s no reason they ever have to be taken away (that’s what open source is for: not only are they supported but you have recourse if Vermont gets hit by a giant meteor. Someone will be able to compile them, thanks to the Patreon-supported open source project that is Airwindows. That’s serious future-proofing)

Date October 28, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 6 Comments

DubCenter

TL;DW: DubCenter is a version of DubSub where the bass reinforcement is purely mono.

DubCenter

So here’s a useful follow-up: as promised, DubSub with mono bass. This isn’t the last you’ll hear of this tool as I have BassKit coming out (which is the more approachable, well-behaved version of DubCenter) but this is the one that will let you get the most extreme. If you were using DubSub to its fullest, this one lets you do the same only with the bass and sub outputs centered.

The reason you’d want to do that is, whether for sound reinforcement or vinyl mastering there’s little reason to have stereo bass. It just makes the woofers fight each other, below a certain frequency (which depends on how far apart your speakers are). This is why elliptical EQs exist.

And the thing with DubCenter is, you don’t have to filter the original audio or mid/side it! All you have to do is use DubCenter to reinforce the bass, and it’ll automatically make that added content mono. This is even better than using (for instance) ToTape and its head bump mechanics to reinforce bass, because that (like a real tape deck) produces a stereo head bump. This produces the same fullness with the same algorithm, but it’s strictly mono so you get the effect of an elliptical EQ without having to run one! Only the super-deep stuff gets reinforced and the information and phase relationships of your original mix go untampered with.

Again, BassKit will do this in a super-convenient way with much of the tweeky functionality simplified or taken out (for that one, there is no chance of abusing the sub-octave to do weird stuff as it’s restricted to only convincing subs content) but DubCenter is the one like DubSub, where you can make it do crazy things. You’ll find it in your plugin menu next to DubSub, most likely. Have fun!

Most of you know I’m on Patreon so I’ll skip that. If you’ve never seen this stuff before, just know that I’m making lots of plugins available, and they are open source and free to you. Nothing is forcing you to keep me alive much less healthy and busily making lots of more plugins. But a bunch of people so far have found that it makes them happy to throw some money my way… for instance, fifty bucks a year as if you were buying one of your Airwindows plugin collection each year at the original price. (permanent license, all formats, and you get the source code and all updates forever for $50. I always did do that, except the open source is new)

Or more if you like, or if it makes sense to you that you’d buy more than one of these. I live in America, so they will only pay attention to me if I’m rich or some other sort of big success. I’d like to make this seem like the hot new business model or at least a cool-as-hell thing to do with your life, so by all means help me make it seem lucrative. I will definitely buy MUSIC GEAR with my ill-gotten booty, and that will probably give me more ideas! :D

Date October 21, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

uLaw

TL;DW: uLaw is a Console-like encode/decode pair, but much more extreme.

uLaw

Sometimes you do a plugin that’s not all that sensible.

Those can be special, though, because those are the ones people can’t get anywhere else.

There’s a process called uLaw compansion. It’s not really compression and expansion, though: it’s like a kind of distortion that can be reversed. It’s used for telephone transmission, and showed up in some of the earliest digital audio processors: back in the day, you had so few bits that you had to make them count.

uLaw comes in two parts. The encoding applies a hideous distortion, making all the quietest sounds unreasonably loud and squishing the dynamic range up into the extreme near-clipping zone. The decoding neatly inverts this process and puts it all back. uLaw (the Airwindows plugin) does the high-resolution calculation of this process, so you can get exactly the compansion to a high degree of accuracy.

What you do then, is you put a bitcrusher like DeRez in between the two uLaw plugins, and it suddenly sounds a lot cleaner with less roaring bit noise, because you’ve remapped where the quantization points are. It’s in the video, and easy to do with DeRez.

And then… you can do all manner of other strange things, because you can put any plugin between uLawEncode and uLawDecode. Not just a bitcrusher. But, anything you put there is going to turn into a monster in a rather pronounced way. For instance, if you put an EQ in there, it will go crazy and any changes you make become loud, distorted parodies of what you meant. If you put a delay or ambience, it’ll get warped very harshly. If you put pitch shifts, flanges, who-knows-what in there, you get shockingly horrible versions back out.

So, you can stick to the bitcrushers (mine or any other one you like: it’s a discrete pair for sandwiching any other plugin or plugins!) or you can treat it as a terrifying new building block that wasn’t directly available (far as I know) before. The plugins have gain and wet/dry controls which normally ought to be all set at 1.0, where they default. I can’t tell you how to use these controls to tame the behavior because it’ll vary with whichever plugin you try, and the controls don’t really belong and won’t necessarily give sensible results. You’re on your own.

Also, you can’t frame a mix using uLaw the way you could using Console: the effect is far too ugly and intense. But there’s one common point: like PurestConsole, if you have just one track playing, it ought to come through pristine and perfect, no matter which single track it is. Then if any other track so much as whispers its presence, you’ll have heinous distortion of an unusual kind. I would say ‘Autechre’ but they’ve probably already done this before in Max/MSP. :)

I make these things because I have a Patreon that frees me from starving, and also frees me from having to release popular and sensible plugins that are nice and approachable. Mind you, some of my plugins can be approachable, and I like making those too… I have progress on the mono-bass version of DubSub, and I’m happy with BassKit, the streamlined and polished mono-bass-enhancer that lets you beef up tapey or bassbin-y fatness in mono or add literal subsonic thunderousness with the octave divider… but thanks to the freedom of the Patreon I can make things that are truly themselves, with no nod to popularity whatsoever.

uLaw is like that. You probably don’t have it because it’s ugly and strange and needs to be designed into a more sensible configuration, typically with a bitcrusher and nothing else, because nearly anything else you do with it produces horrible noises.

I’m genuinely happy to bring you this audio chainsaw. You never can tell what will be handy, either as the pair, or individually: logarithmic processing may well find creative uses. Have fun!

Date October 14, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 8 Comments

Chris

DeEss

ADT

DubCenter

uLaw

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Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

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