Airwindows

Noise

TL;DW: The Airwindows deep noise oscillator, as a sound reinforcer.

Here’s a post from airwindows-land, just to show you I’m still working ;)

Noise started out as a plugin called Voice Of The Starship. It’s an algorithm that generates brownian-motion noise which won’t ‘wander’ into excessive DC offset, but without a highpass filter needed! The original Voice Of The Starship can be made to do any sort of deep rumble, including purely subsonic rumble that still works as an audio stream. When that one comes out, it’s definitely going to the open source repo.

Oh, did I mention? Airwindows Open Source is live. That’s been taking a lot of my effort as I’ve tried to provide the templates I use to make plugins, AND several basic starter plugins ‘as shipped’ (when my stuff goes OSS it’s strictly as I made it without alterations, but the templates should be customized so you can use them as yourself and not me)

And it’s still not really complete, and I won’t be able to help people get plugins compiling on their systems as that’s my nemesis in the first place, but it’s a start!

And I’ve also been putting in a LOT of work on a project (inspired greatly by Bastl) for helping people DIY Eurorack synth modules. I have some straight-up awesome ideas for Euro-stuff, including things people can do themselves, and I’m scheming up ways to get the necessary parts into your hands provided you can solder things together (always good). I want to get people making stuff for less than $100. You should be able to have a Eurorack hacker kit for very little money, and all the information you’d need to do as I do and make large amounts of stuff.

Thanks to a year (and more!) of Patreon, I’ve got just enough resources to run with this and learn what’s good, and even get into stuff out of my childhood. I had a Radio Shack Concertmate Moog when I was a kid. Now, I got my first Mother32, and am hot on the trail of the impending DFAM (which I think is going to be the ultimate modular kick for reasons I’ll explain later, having to do with both the sound of the thing and details on how the Moog sequencer tempo stuff works), and yeah: I’m exhausted. I have plugins ready to come out (including PurestDrive!) but I’ve had an awful lot going on (second funeral for Mom, and my gray cat is approaching the end of her life), and in some ways I’m taking refuge in this new stream of work. I think you’ll be interested. One thing about it, if it works we’ll suddenly be moving past the same old Airwindows demo music, in a good way.

Oh, right, Noise. Noise is like Voice Of The Spaceship, except it also triggers on input sounds. It can pretty closely track rhythms coming in, and you can combine it with underlying stuff with Dry/Wet, and the Distance control applies to both Dry AND Wet, to blend and darken them together.

Hope you like it, and next week I’ll give you a whole new take on Groove Wear (out of ToVinyl). :)

Date January 21, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

ToVinyl4

TL;DW: Elliptical EQ, acceleration limiter, groove sim.

ToVinyl4

ToVinyl has several uses. You can use it to reshape the bass in your track, making it more mono or tightening up the center. It’s a special multipole IIR filter that acts almost like a ‘mega-bass’ plugin: it doesn’t just take away, it rearranges (so don’t expect it to act like a normal digital cut, you might see increased peak energy down low.)

Then, there’s the acceleration limiter. This algorithm is unlike any other Airwindows treble-reducer: it zeroes in on just the sorts of transients that’d burn up a cutting head, and zaps them ruthlessly. (if you own a cutting head you’re responsible for checking this, but some of you folks are still using Spitfish, and I’m pretty sure this will way outperform Spitfish.) The effect is treble softening without any obvious treble reduction, and it’ll make stuff sound like classic vinyl grooves very effectively.

But that’s nothing compared to the next control, Groove Wear. This one analyzes the virtual groove, and then sets up an imaginary stylus going down that groove, and gives it a tiny bit of inertia. It’s more slew mojo (and not tied to any particular frequency, it doesn’t even know what a frequency is) and the effect (should you choose to use it) is a very characteristic darkening and slight trashening of the most extreme highs. You can shut it off entirely, or turn it up, and you can combine it with the acceleration limiter to get pretty much any ‘vinyl LP high end’ you want. Some settings even bring a touch of moving-coil sparkle: it’s not all darken, in fact Groove Wear is very much its own thing distortion-wise.

Combine it all together and you’ve got ToVinyl4, the up-to-date version of a classic Airwindows for-pay plugin, that did quite well at $50. This time it’s free, because…

This work is made possible by Patreon, which is why you can simply download the latest ToVinyl and use it. If it’s super useful to you (and if you can), you should zip over to Patreon and act as if you’re buying it as a permanent license. Why? Because it is, and because if people who can still buy plugins choose to bump my Patreon by roughly $50 a year whenever they’ve added a bunch of new secret weapons to their arsenal, I’ll be able to continue what I do. Also, if you get crazy enough with it, talk to me and I’ll totally promote your music :) there’s a three/four/five plugin club on the Airwindows site, waiting to have people go listen to the fruits of all this freeness.

Date January 7, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 10 Comments

PurestConsole

TL;DW: Console 5 with the least coloration it can have.

PurestConsole

So. I think things may improve around here, as far as me reviewing the Console5 launch, and making sense of what the heck went on there. If I can, I’ll also give it the lushness of that original release while preventing the DC offset stuff… and there’s something to do with the AU/VST identities that needs examining. After this, ToVinyl is up for January, and I’ve got some useful variations on Console 5, and PurestDrive is February (I’m entertaining notions of a C5Drive that steals the technique from PurestDrive instead of doing the original C5 slew thing. It would be just ‘darker’, not encode/decode)

The reason I think I can get into all this (after probably being sick for a while) is I’ve got some closure. I’ve just returned from visiting family and attending my Mom’s funeral. It was very nice: I sat with my Dad, who built us the Heathkit television we played Atari 2600 on, and with the brother who helped me get the VST ports together, a year ago. I cooked my Dad a big hot curry, and I think he liked it. Got to be with my siblings, and there was some healing, and I’m pretty sure after I rest up I’ll be able to think again.

Good thing some plugins are so simple you don’t even have to think! :) (in other words, if THESE are broken just shoot me ;) )

PurestConsole is like the dynamics encode/decode out of Console5, without the slew mojo that’s so tricky to get right. It’s a good candidate for the first plugin(s) to be open sourced when I hit the $800/mo. open source goal, along with templates I work from, and my process so people can reproduce my work. In fact I can reveal the guts of the PurestConsole source, without the Airwindows denormalization code and noise shaping to floating point. Here’s the simplest purest form of Console.

Channels: inputSample = sin(inputSample);
Buss: inputSample = asin(inputSample);

Without all the mojo and tone changing, that is IT. Anyone building a DAW can include this (channels post fader! And do not allow the asin() to see values that’ll break it, you can get NaN out of math functions if you break them!).

PurestConsole has special properties, besides ‘being in the Console5 family so you can swap them out freely with any Console5 variation and get correct results’. Since the amplitude encode/decode is most important to the effect, stripping it down to THIS simple has an interesting property I demonstrate in the video.

If you have only one channel feeding the buss, you get EXACTLY that channel without the slightest alteration. PurestConsole cancels out completely and doesn’t touch the sound AT ALL unless multiple channels are mixing. If any one source becomes the only feed to the buss, it goes to perfect bit-identical fidelity to the extent of what the math function can provide. No previous version of Console can say that because I was trying to use simpler math to save CPU, but PurestConsole (and all Console5) goes for the math functions which include the complementary sin() and asin() or ‘arcsine’. That’s what arcsine is for. :)

You can use PurestConsole in its capacity for ‘expanding’ verbs, delays, and EQs. If there’s no change, it’ll cancel out to bit-identical. Then if you’re doing stuff, it’ll kick in. EQ changes are most easily heard in high-Q filters, and it’ll make filters more effective at a given dB boost/cut. Note that you can easily clip PurestConsoleBuss with boosts and peaks, but that might sound OK to you so don’t fear it.

I hope this simpler one is good right out of the gate, because I AM going to be sick for a while, but it might be something else to chew on, and if it is in fact so simple as to be flawless, you can work with this one right away :)

Date January 1, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 11 Comments

Console5

TL;DW: Richer, warmer Console system.

Console5

Welcome to the new best :)

Console5 uses some more ‘expensive’ math operations, where previous Consoles tried to do their thing while keeping the Channel component as low-CPU as they possibly could. This might mean a heavier CPU cost, or it might be not that much of a difference. It’s a change (the math here more closely resembles Density or PurestDrive).

What do you gain? Using this more advanced math means there are functions which can exactly ‘undistort’ what comes in (more on that property later: there’s a variation on Console that perfectly nulls when only one track is active). This brings an added level of bigness and signal purity. Then, Console5 applies a similar behavior to the slew factor, but backwards to what the amplitude factor is getting. Doing that takes Console5 away from perfect transparency (and subtlety) and gives it a big, beefy, large-console sound that still doesn’t radically alter individual tones… but throws in TONS of ‘glue’ and solidness compared to the raw digital mix.

This is not a thing you’d struggle to hear (listen for depth and space, not frequency changes). This is not a thing that’d get washed out in mp3 encoding (in fact, because of the way it restricts slews in Console5Buss, it’ll actually help encoding a teeny bit, because superhigh frequencies waste bandwidth better used on the mids). This is the new Console, and it should be a real revelation to mix through, no matter what style or genre you’re working in.

As seen in the video, if you’ve got a DAW that can enable/disable plugins on selected channels, you can audition it with one mouse click to switch. Console5 works like this: you want Console5Channel on every channel feeding the 2-buss (with all submixing and all post-plugin faders at unity gain), and Console5Buss first on the 2-buss. That’s all, just replace digital summing with this system. If you can do post-fader plugins, you can use the faders (otherwise, best use the trims on the Console5Channels, or any earlier gain trim). The point is to replace your digital summing network with the Console5 system.

If you have that mastered, you can start playing with stuff like putting things ‘inside’ Console: delays, reverbs, EQs. Plain digital EQ in particular benefits from being post-Console5Channel on the track. Gain stage everything so you’re not slamming Console5Buss more than about +3 dB: it should survive hot peaks but there’s no special benefit to clipping it, and Console5Buss will clip there. Ideally, you’ll frame a mix with Console5 in place, and you may find you don’t need to do nearly as much ‘twitchy DAW stuff’ to get things sounding acceptable. Console5 addresses the root of the problem in a way no other ‘console emulation’ does. (if they do, you’ll find they have exactly the same constraints: needing to keep unity gain between Channel and Buss plugins is a dead giveaway they are using the Airwindows design)

Console5 exists because people have supported my Patreon for more than a year. Without it, I’d have had to stop working. I’d like a solider foundation for expressing myself in this industry and the only way to do that in 2017-2018 is to show money, and Patreon’s experiments earlier this month showed me the folly of trying to subsist on tiny patron donations.

So, Console5 is free to all to use, and then if you earn more than me (minimum wage earns more than the vast majority of Patreons, including mine) I’d like you to ‘buy’ some of the plugins I give you, as if they were $50 to own forever. It’s tricky to keep up with what Patreon does fee-wise, but so long as they’re not adding patron fees, $4.16 a month makes $50 a year. There should be at least one plugin from Airwindows a year you find world-changing, otherwise don’t pay. $8.33 a month makes $100 a year, if there are two plugins like that, or if $100 a year to support Airwindows isn’t a hardship for you.

At $12.50, $16.66, and $20.83 a month ($150, $200, $250 a year) I will put your name/link up on the Airwindows site (music link, ideally) in the Five, Four, and Three Plugin Club areas. That’s high up on the left sidebar, and people might well go and check your music out knowing you’re helping out Airwindows which gives them so many free plugins. I think that’d confer some goodwill, and since I don’t actually withhold any plugins for high tiers of patronage, this is all I can do but it should mean something. Also, if you are $250 a year or better, I’ll put your name literally on my video (across where the Dock is in my screen capture, readably).

Thank you for helping me get this far! I guess the next step is world domination ;) or, at least, being able to talk to my industry (and Patreon) more on the level of a ‘success’. I’m happy just to bring plugins to my users. Since the outside world doesn’t care whether my users are happy and is only concerned with whether I’m taking their money, we will just try to do both: help me be heard, and I’ll keep giving you the tools you need (which cannot be taken away, won’t expire, work on a wide range of DAWs and computers, and will become open source one by one when I hit that goal…)

I hope you enjoy Console5. :)

(note: the original version used a different sort of slew handling that freaked out on waves like sawtooths, and it had to be rehacked on launch day. If you’d like a copy of the first fix—which is like the launch version but slightly moderated—you can download it from OriginalConsole5 but don’t have both it and the current version in your plugins folder at once. There’s also the first fix, which was brighter and harsher: it fixed the DC issue but lost a lot doing so. That one can be had at RevisedConsole5, for instance if you did a mix while Console was in flux, and need the temporary version for recalls. This is strictly for experimenters and for normal use the current Console5 should work best, and you should use that and not these.)

Date December 25, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 39 Comments

Chris

Noise

ToVinyl4

PurestConsole

Console5

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club