Airwindows

ButterComp

TL;DW: Softest smoothest compressor.

Sometimes a plugin can be a sort of cult favorite. That’s the story of ButterComp, a compressor of great subtlety that’s no use for quite a few normal compressor tasks… but still has a fervent following. I’ve been begged for the new version of this one (not merely VST, but revamped with all the current Airwindows sophistication and purity) and I’m delighted to bring it, though I think it might puzzle some people. If the stock Logic comp would do as well, this isn’t the plugin for you. But if you’re looking for a certain thing and thought it unattainable in software, this might be your lucky day.

Buttercomp, under the hood, is absolutely unique (or unique, until I start working on variations and until other people try to copy it. They’re free to, but it’ll be possible to test that quite easily with special audio files).

It’s a bipolar, interleaved compressor (with rather slow attack and release: a version with access to much faster dynamics is available in CStrip). This one’s the original, the cult classic. What is a bipolar, or an interleaved compressor? For the purposes of Buttercomp, it’s four totally independent compressors per channel. Two are sensitive to positive swing, and flip back and forth every sample. Two are sensitive to negative swing, also flipping back and forth every sample. The compression factor’s reconstructed through combining these poles, through the screen of the interleaved compressors switching back and forth at the Nyquist frequency… that mysterious digital frequency that is on the one hand the literal highest frequency that can be encoded, and the lowest frequency that ought to be totally rejected and filtered out.

What happens is this: the tone of things gets some added second harmonic, wherever the compression is more strong on one side than the other. High frequencies take on a particular airy openness, since they too get second harmonic, plus individual sample spikes can only affect one out of four compressors: ButterComp deals with all samples only as samples relative to other samples, and doesn’t get thrown off by isolated samples that don’t represent the actual waveform. It’s got a sound, but the sound is hard to define because of its extreme fluidity and purity.

If this sounds like your idea of fun, enjoy ButterComp. If you’re looking for the ‘all buttons in’ mode, I’ll get back to the drawing board and probably do something totally different for you. This compressor is not for everybody. Also, if you start slamming it really hard (demonstrated in the video), it’ll volume invert: you can squish it down to become more quiet than the quiet passages, but still it will retain its tone quality. It’s perhaps best used as a particular kind of ‘glue’ compressor, at which it is exceptional… or maybe I should say, it’s unique. Start working with it and you’ll soon work out whether you’re part of the ButterComp cult. Not everybody will be, and it’s only one type of sound… but nothing else can get that sound, and this is why I’ve kept this purest form of the algorithm available.

The people who love it, will be happy to see it brought up to modern-day specs and available as AU plus Mac and PC VST. And that’s enough.

This work is made possible by Patreon, and my Patreon’s doing nicely these days! If you can, jump on it at an equivalent to ‘buying the plugins you love best, from me’. That might be $50 a year, or $100 if there’s two plugins that truly rock your world, or simply $12 a year if Patreon stays viable at a $1 a month level. For me, working out rates based on ‘plugin sales per year’ turned out to make sense, and whether or not that passes more money through to me, it does help me in a big way. Among other things, I have more of a voice in the industry, and more of a voice with Patreon, if I turn out to be one of their viral success stories, and there’s only one way that can happen. (you also get more and better plugins quicker, and the launch of my open source project, and those are good things too)

I’ve now told everyone reading this, how to code the unique ButterComp configuration of multiple parallel compressors. If all goes well, one day I’ll also be giving people the code, and templates for building your own plugins (if you have a matching build environment to mine, and I can coach people on that), and the ‘maker’ movement can get off and running with countless ways to hack their own digital audio… with my blessing.

For now, I hope you like ButterComp. Next: the new Console plugins. But that’s for another week…

Date December 17, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 13 Comments

Swell

TL;DW: Dial-an-attack, like sidechaining.

Swell

Every now and then you come up with something a little different. The fun of that is in identifying it.

I’ve been listening to house music by Deadmau5, and I took an interest in the way the sidechaining worked. (That’s the way the music, or the reverb, or the pads, get ‘smooshed’ down by the kick drum and then swing back up in volume again.) The Mau5 is pretty good about talking about his techniques, which I appreciate (I’d love to do a coffee run with that guy someday) and he’s spent some time showing people how instead of actually sidechaining, he automates an LFO which he applies to track volume. It gets a great effect.

I wondered whether it’d work to do a gate that intentionally opened real slow. Specifically, it seemed possible to treat ‘full volume’ as a ‘floor’ and have a ‘decay’ that falls up toward 1.0 rather than down to 0. It’d never quite get there, but it could have a similar envelope as the fall-off of natural reverb, just upside down.

If that sounds odd, don’t worry about it, just try Swell. It has a threshold like a gate, and the Swell control handles the attack speed once the gate opens. The dry/wet works as you’d expect. Sort of like Deadmau5’s LFO trick, it doesn’t have to be a real sidechain, and is independent of whatever kick you have going on. Unlike the LFO trick, it’s also not tied to tempo: Swell reacts to EVERY attack that comes along, provided the threshold’s set right.

What this does is very interesting. I expect to see this turn up in an EDM channel strip at some point. Essentially, you can play with the controls in various ways and completely step on the attack of anything you want. This relates to GROOVE and the layering of stuff in a dance mix: any element, no matter what it is, can be turned into a pad and back again, just by squishing away its attack. You can do it live, you can take an element (snare, punchy chord) and manipulate how it hits inside the groove. Extreme values make stuff extra soft and quiet and squishy, and then if you drop the threshold or Swell, you can have the element jump right back out again, and the control is direct, not relative to a sidechained track or LFO setting. It’s a more organic approach, more hands-on, and I think it’ll fit into a lot of people’s mixes. There’s always a place for balancing the intensity of the attacks of your tracks, and that’s literally what Swell does.

Swell’s made possible by my Patreon. There’s been a little drama over Patreon, so I’ve revamped my pledge levels so I could communicate exactly what you’d be paying at any imaginable pledge level. I hope other Patreon creators find my tier system useful, as it lets people know what to expect: if Patreon doesn’t want to do that, well, I do.

Date December 10, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Regarding Patreon

As of Wednesday the 13th, 2017, Patreon announced that they’re not going to do this. I’ll follow up whenever we get the new numbers, if we even do: this may have burned them hard enough that they’ll not attempt anything of the sort again. I’ll be interested to know if there’s any benefit to larger pledges, as they forced me to completely overhaul my whole way of thinking about my pledge structure, and then abandoned it (for the purposes of their abandoned plan, people were getting more effectiveness out of larger pledges, and I had to acknowledge that)

Date December 9, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

CStrip

TL;DW: Airwindows channel strip.

CStrip

Sometimes, Airwindows dabbles with what you might call ‘the normal’ plugins: for instance, CStrip. I was asked to make a channel strip, and while I usually prefer to do things in a more modular sense, it seemed like a fine idea, and so now there’s an Airwindows channel strip, with sort of the usual things you might find there.

Sort of. ;)

It’s never quite that simple with Airwindows. So, you’ve got a three band EQ, but if you boost the top you get traces of the ‘Energy’ plugin just to add some aggressiveness to the extreme highs for heavy boosts. You’ve got crossover frequencies, you’ve got highpass and lowpass, but the highpass and lowpass aren’t normal algorithms either: they’re designed for ‘trapping in’ already bandlimited sounds to get the most out of them. There’s a gate, but it’s an Airwindows gate where the release is designed to pull the audio back in the sound picture, not just volume-ramp it. There’s a time delay control that exists only to give the track a micro-delay relative to other tracks for groove purposes. And there’s the compressor… CStrip uses the ButterComp algorithm plus a speed control that lets you do odd things like increase the speed hugely. ButterComp compresses interleaved samples in Class AB, so that’s four independent compressors per channel. If you crank the speed under heavy compression you can get artifacts (for normal behavior, keep the speed a lot lower).

The whole idea with CStrip was to do the channel strip, but take it out into stranger realms where it can be used for various sonic destruction. It may not be the last of such plugins: some new stuff coming out is giving me ideas for other ‘combination’ plugins, especially ones where the algorithms can be interwoven to produce effects you literally couldn’t have out of discrete plugins. (one day, I’ll be open sourcing all of that and telling other plugin coders all about it)

CStrip also uses a technique I came to rely on, where if a component of the plugin isn’t being used (for instance, the lowpass and highpass when set to their extremes switch off) then it gets completely bypassed, and not even the math of the component is used: this is sort of like how ‘unity gain’ in code isn’t the same as ‘bypass’. (if you’re in floating point and you’re multiplying by 1.0, you’re also doing a math operation at a given exponent and this can wipe out floating point values at very different levels of detail)

But that’s getting too wonky: I hope you enjoy CStrip. All this is of course supported by Patreon, and though we’re not up to ‘open sourcing’ levels, or even ‘bonus plugin’ from the list for December, trust me that I’ll have some nice surprises for your holiday season anyway :)

Date December 3, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 13 Comments

Chris

ButterComp

Swell

Regarding Patreon

CStrip

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club