Airwindows

uLaw

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

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

DubSub

TL;DW: DubSub is a fully featured bass doctor.

DubSub

Be careful what you wish for. I like making plugins with very few controls, but when you have to use ALL the controls…

Here’s how it works. The top section, Treble Grind, is like a bass guitar presence circuit. You shouldn’t use that for hi-fi purposes, if you want clean pass-through use the Dry/Wet. Treble Grind works like a distortion, and has an Inverse/Out control allowing you to subtract it as well as add it. ‘zero’ is in the middle.

Crossover determines what goes to the Treble Grind, and what goes to the bass sections. To make it track bass better, set the crossover low.

Bass Drive is how hard you’re pushing the main bass section. It’s essentially an adjustable Head Bump control like in ToTape. Bass Voicing controls the depth of the bass boost: setting it higher up sounds more like overdriving a bass amp. Bass Inv/Out is the same as in the Treble Grind section, an ‘attenuverter’ like in certain Eurorack modules: it lets you subtract the bass, not just add it.

Sub Drive, Sub Voicing, and Sub Inv/Out are much like the bass section, except they work on an octave-divided version of the bass section. This helps it get good octave-down sounds some of the time, but it’s not anything like a digital suboctave synthesizer: it’s working crudely like an analog octave divider, which means it can make horrible noises if it doesn’t have clean signal to work with. This is of course intentional :) if you want it to do a recognizable sub-note, feed it a carefully controlled signal off a single track. Or, you can set it very deep and not mix in all that much of it, and get an interesting effect sound. For cleaner deep bass, work with the main bass section, or voice both of them very deep in hopes of cleaning up the sub-bass section a little by refusing to let it have more complicated signals.

All this work is supported by my Patreon, and there’s more work to be done: as I was finishing this one up (in the dual-mono capable form that the original DubSub used) I realized that it would be possible to do one that only worked in stereo, and produced only a mono bass and sub channel. Possibly also minus the treble grind, as the mono-bass one would be more of a mix tool: I don’t know, I could keep the grind if people used it. The point being, I can make one where the added bass is always mono (not true of original DubSub, or FathomFive, or even ToTape) and that’ll be useful, but it’ll also make the added bass info very obviously centered, possibly not sounding like part of a stereo track at all (if the stereo track has more complicated bass imaging). On the other hand, it’ll be way better for lows reinforcement on tracks, particularly EDM.

So, I’m not done working and I have some decisions to make. I’m going to do the mono-bass version, but let me know if it would be helpful to skip stuff that might never find practical use. I’m not sure the grind and crossover (or maybe even the sub) have a place in that context, and I could make one where crossover is always low (like 0) and maybe bass and sub voicings are linked? The key parts would be bass and sub inv/out and most likely bass and sub drive being independent (so you could just hint at some sub-octave but drive the bass harder for some compression-like activity).

Or it could be literally exactly DubSub but with mono bass.

Or one of each, so people interested in a more focussed plugin could have that :)

Enjoy DubSub, and I’ll see where the mono thing takes me. Let me know what sounds desirable!

Date October 7, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 6 Comments

ButterComp2

TL;DW: ButterComp2 is improved ButterComp with an output control and sound upgrades.

ButterComp2

As requested, ButterComp with output gain. And an unexpected bugfix. And a tone upgrade!

So here’s what happened: in working on the new ButterComp, I found a mistake. Because of a thing C programming lets you do (assign, in an if statement) it turned out the original ButterComp didn’t actually use the interleaved compressors after all. The one in CStrip does, but actual ButterComp (which has its own distinct fans!) doesn’t. It’s strictly a bi-polar compressor: it does each half of the wave different, and blends them.

Because of this, I’ve made the source code (also being released) represent what the plugin actually does in practice. It’s a little simplified, and it’s worth paying attention to, for people who like the simplest most minimal form of ButterComp.

But, because of this, I get to release ButterComp2 as very much its own thing! I even came up with a subtle tweak: it modifies its release just a touch, slowing it when the signal’s hot. That’s on a sample-by-sample basis… and it’s on the OUTPUT of the compressor. So, this further smoothing effect is subject to the output level control. And the dry/wet. In fact if you had it all dry, the release modification is therefore as if you had it on the input… making it blend not only between positive and negative wave compression, but also between feedback and feed-forward release time modifications :)

But really what you need to do is listen to it.

With the interleaved compressors fully working AND the bi-polar compression on each, there is indeed the four distinct compressors working in parallel. The whole thing is very gentle (hence the name) but you’ll get a glue and tonal reshaping out of it as it will even out the bulk of the waveform, making it balanced between positive and negative. It’ll also soak up treble detail in a characteristic way, and you’ll really hear the quality of ButterComp2 on ambiences and reverb tails. It’ll float things in space in this holographic way… I thought it made for a significant tonal improvement over the simpler ButterComp.

All this work is supported by my Patreon, and I’ve got plenty more to do so I appreciate the help. Although the challenges of continuing to deal with my Mom and Dad’s deaths (and even the gray cat: she passed away between Mom and Dad) are still with me, I’m keeping busy as much as I can, and some things have gone well: for anyone concerned about Steinberg’s plans for sunsetting VST2, I have now got their license to continue making VST2. Signed and everything, so I can’t help anybody post-October who wants to make VST2s but I’ll be able to keep making them, legally. Pretty sure I can also specify what files you’d need to add to my open source that would make the results build.

In the future, things like music and plugin-making become a kind of communication. There’ll be just one commercial plugin, with 57,000 knobs on it, and you can only rent it and everyone commercial must have it… and then the rest of us, we share interesting little creations back and forth, our works appreciated by a circle of friends who happen to be friends of music or of coding, linked across states and countries by our cooperation.

Until then… thanks for listening to my curious and awkward but helpful voice :)

Date September 30, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Pop

TL;DW: Pop is a crazy overcompressor with a very exaggerated sound.

Pop

Why another compressor?

Yes, ‘because they all act and sound a little different’, but what’s the deal with this one in particular?

Pop was designed to be overstressed to get an effect like the Allen & Heath mini-limiter used on some 80s Genesis and Phil Collins songs: that huge attack, the way that little subtleties jump boldly out of the mix, the sheer squish and gnarl of it all. It wasn’t really about trying to model the specific gear so much as trying to get the effect, or more of the effect: I especially wanted the front end of sounds to burst through with enormous presence, but I also wanted to bring up little details out of the performance.

Pop’s a huge success at this. On some audio, I can get weird little reverb elements from the background to seem to hover up front even while loud stuff is being smashed. It’s designed to volume invert: the idea is if you’re hitting it with superloud things it can overcompensate and push the volume down extra far, letting you further exaggerate the effect.

As such, there are some sounds this just can’t do. If you try and get a huge thunderous smashed sound of it, it will just go super 80s and give you a loud attack and maybe even backwards decay, or some reinvention of the body of the sound. You have to set the level carefully to get the right sound happening, so it’s not terribly flexible: Pop is picky and you have to work it almost like it’s an instrument. It does run without latency, so in theory you could do like Phil did and track directly into it (or track into the DAW with it already present in the monitoring path) so you could modulate your singing intensity to work with it. That ought to work. Also remember a slapback echo, and to actually doubletrack!

If I can ever get the real preamp/compressor, I’ll study the heck out of it and do Pop 2. I’ll keep an eye out, as that would be really rewarding work and I could probably get closer to the real thing with that kind of reference :)

Patreon is how I’d be in a position to do that work: if I do well enough with Patreon, I can invest in bits of gear that I’d be really interested in emulating. As you can see, I can put a lot of effort into modeling a limiter that I don’t even have! How much nicer would it be if I could work on stuff and really study it in person. Another example: my old ResEQ is a little bit like the resonator networks in the old Polymoog. You know, the one that’s not gnarly like a classic Moog but has its own strange and deeply unreliable mojo… well, part of a Polymoog is a series of resonator filters that give an amazing effect. And I can do stuff similar to that with ResEQ, which was an innovative way to produce a resonant EQ peak. But how much neater would it be to turn that technology to giving you the Polymoog resonator functionality, as that synth had it?

Date September 16, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

Chris

uLaw

DubSub

ButterComp2

Pop

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