Airwindows

Logical4

TL;DW: Classic 2-buss compressor.

Here’s another one of the bestsellers. Ironically, version 4 is way better than any of the previous versions, and free! (Patreon supported)

Logical’s a compressor. It was designed from the start to work on the 2-buss in the most demanding conditions: people are really picky about their 2-buss compressors, and you can’t mess around. The tone has to be spot-on and it’s got to be transparent and able to let the music through. Additionally, when we’re talking about ‘tone’ and something called ‘Logical’ you can see that it’s going to be in the SSL style: there’s a sparkliness which requires some extra coding attention.

You can approach compression duties from several directions with Logical. It has three distinct stages, and will entirely bypass stages it’s not using. It’ll go from 1/1 compression, up to 2/1 using just a single stage (for the utmost transparency): keep it below 2/1 ratio and use the threshold control to bring in the compression. This is a traditional 2-buss natural-sounding compression. From 2/1 to 4/1 ratio, you can get various behaviors and the two stages in use still sound very clean: the speed control will give you different kinds of ‘swing’ and spring-back out of the compression.

Then as you pass 4/1 ratio and go off to a max of 16/1 (approximate, but that’s the basic idea) there’s a tone change, and as you get into crazy high ratios, Logical goes a little bonkers. This was NOT available in previous Logicals. The issue was, if you rely heavily on that final compression stage, things can get messy. You can push Logical until it’s nasty and so full of energy it’s forcing you to use the makeup gain to PAD the output, just to handle all the madness.

This time, and in honor of Logical going free VST format, it’s not set up for only good behavior. This time, it’s your responsibility to not blow up your outputs by thoughtlessly cranking the ratio. Consider it an audio chainsaw made of silk and glorious victories. Not every top-selling plugin got this much better when I revisited it. I’m very pleased with how Logical4 came out, and I hope to see it talked about a whole bunch. This one’s worth a lot of ‘did you hear?’.

Also, in the video, you get to see my reaction to a classic silly mistake: bypassing it and then thinking I’d unbypassed it again. It was actually only about forty-five seconds of earnestly explaining the nothing that I was accomplishing, but I saved you the Moment Of Realization so you can enjoy my discomfiture. My excuse: firstly, it’s funny and we’ve all done that, and secondly, I’ve just released Logical 4 free for AU and Mac and PC VST. So I think I can be forgiven a little foolishness with the bypass button :)

Please help my Patreon grow in numbers: more than individual high pledges, I’d like to see lots of people discover what I’m doing. If there are lots of people all of whom are pledging only a small, affordable amount each month to keep me doing this work, it brings me stability and lets me do stuff I care about. You’ll be seeing more neat things out of me, and I remain at the level where I’m doing the top-seller plugins one a month, and if I reach $700 again (from smaller individual patrons this time) I’ll be picking stuff off the bottom of that list too. We did get to StarChild, so don’t underestimate the coolness of the ‘less top selling’ plugins that were part of my Kagi storefront. :)

Date September 10, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 12 Comments

DustBunny

TL;DW: Unpredictable distorty noise!

DustBunny

And then sometimes there’s a plugin that just makes you go ‘wut’…

DustBunny was an accident. I was doing something and put out a plugin (possibly a freebie) and there was a bug and I was in a hurry and put it out without checking… and quickly learned something horrible was wrong. Initial reports were along the lines of ‘oops’ and ‘yikes’, and when I checked, sure enough, the plugin erupted in terrible scrunch, and I in turn erupted in apologies and scrambled to fix the problem (which wasn’t that hard).

But even before I’d got the fix out (and simple oversight problems, I sometimes fix within hours), more reports were coming in: hold on, don’t fix it, it’s cool!

That wasn’t what I had in mind, but the solution was obvious: DustBunny was born. This twisted little plugin just applies a weird accidental scrunch based on where the bunny control is set. Please don’t use it on the 2-buss, or in mastering :) but more seriously, this is born to sit inside some kind of weird plugin matrix device as part of a nefarious sound design idea. It would’ve been perfect in one of the parallel effect chains used on the latest DOOM soundtrack, mangling a sinewave. If you hit it with high levels it gets kind of jumpy, so you might want to give it more restrained levels. If you don’t like running a gain trim in front of it, run something more amusing like a delay or a flanger to pad your signal a touch.

DustBunny is kind of like a joke, except for it’s real and does produce an unusual, distinctive effect (or 1000, as all the settings are kind of unique). I’m still here to post things like this because of my Patreon, which has been slowly but steadily growing since last year. The more the Patreon grows, the more cool things I can do and bring you the happy results.

Or, sometimes, just bring you odd little presents like DustBunny. Hope you like it! Next comes my mono Chorus, and then it’s Logical, and then one of the ‘unsung’ plugins, which doesn’t exist anywhere else and sold very few copies in its day. But that would be telling :)

Date August 23, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

StarChild

TL;DW: A weird digital ambience!

StarChild

For all that we try to make plugins have natural, acoustic or electric, retro vibe qualities, sometimes there’s a thing which breaks the rules by creating a distinctive voice that has nothing to do with naturalness. I’ve got an old Alesis reverb like that: very primitive, but deep as anything. There have always been odd little boxes with a style all their own, like the Delta Labs Effectron, which is low-fi but uses delta-sigma modulation like an SACD (but much more crudely!)

In that spirit, here’s StarChild. The inspiration came from the old Ursa Major Space Station. That said, StarChild sounds nothing like a Space Station, but it does sound like it’s out of this world. Like Space Station, it produces series of echo taps which aren’t perfectly regular. Space Station has little rhythms that it does, while StarChild works on prime number sequences: that produces a sputtery sort of delay line in which it won’t reinforce any one frequency.

What you get is a curious delay/ambience effect, in stereo (it’ll widen stuff that’s only in the middle). It can work kind of like a natural ambience that’s a room in a horrible shape, or you can crank out the duration and get weird stretched textures with a variety of granularity. It’s an odd little plugin: didn’t sell that well in its earlier incarnation, yet this revised newer form is hotly anticipated: a bunch of people really started wanting it when Kagi (my payment processor) went out of business and suddenly it couldn’t be sold.

Now that doesn’t matter, because I’m using my Patreon to live on (granted, it’s sort of crisis mode but it will grow in time) and the plugins are being given away for free. I hope you enjoy it. If the Patreon reaches $800 a month, I will begin open sourcing the plugins one by one, and StarChild could be one of those plugins. (Please, stay within an order of magnitude or so of the $1-$2 that the Patreon is designed to ask: I have no wish to depend on individuals giving… or withholding… vast sums just by themselves)

I hope you like StarChild. I know quite a few people who eagerly awaited this one.

Date August 16, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Desk4

TL;DW: Distinctive analog coloration.

Desk4

Though I’ve put out BussColors to mimic existing audio hardware, it was always my intention to create analog-ifying plugins that weren’t about cloning existing gear: that produced their own distinctive sound. The first Desk plugins (Desk, TransDesk, TubeDesk) were made in this way, using audio DSP which isn’t typical.

As this line of experimentation evolved, it led me to what we’ve got here. Desk4 is the latest refinement of the Desk line, now for Mac and PC VST (as well as AU)… and free.

The drive control is a boost as you might expect. Turn it up for more slam and dirt. It’s very soft, textured, rich-in-nutrients dirt, but it’s basically ‘distortion’.

Treble Choke is more unusual: don’t overcrank this control or you’ll generate artifacts such as uncontrolled DC. It’s not a normal algorithm and not a traditional EQ or even a saturation: as you can tell from the weird behavior when you crank it. Use it subtly and you’ll have a brightness conditioner not found outside quality analog gear. Since it’s a plugin, you can also push the extremes of the behavior, just don’t get too carried away. It’s designed to let you break it with extreme settings, so it’ll be flexible across different kinds of audio.

The power sag and frequency controls are the heart of some behaviors in the earlier TubeDesk and TransDesk: you can make your imaginary analog hardware overload its power supply. Cranking the frequency slider moves the area of interest down, for tube power supply sag behaviors. Tiny settings work over a tiny range of samples, causing the effect to hit higher frequencies. If you hear an obvious effect, you’re probably applying too much… unless you intentionally want to crap out the audio, in which case this is a uniquely aggressive way of doing that. It’ll add grunge in an entirely different way from simple distortion, so you can do both.

These things are made possible by my Patreon. If I get it to more than $800 a month, I’ll begin open-sourcing these plugins, and that’ll open up the world of plugins in a whole new way. I’ll also make available my templates so that people can more easily begin coding their own stuff (which doesn’t mean it will BE easy, but it’s a way to help new coders and people like me who have more DSP ideas than systems coding expertise). Currently, I’m putting out one a month from my Greatest Hits list, an extra from the more obscure and unsung end of that list, plus additional plugins out of my library of successful AU plugins.

Also, if the Patreon gets some more patrons (not money so much as just new patrons), I can appear in the top 50 of Graphtreon.com’s Gamer charts! I’m currently at 51 on that list, and it’s possible being more visible would help me and Airwindows, so I’m excited to see what’ll happen there! I will be by far the lowest income creator on that top 50, because I give people more while asking less. But it’ll be great fun to know I’m in the top 50 of something Patreon-related :)

Date August 6, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Chris

Logical4

DustBunny

StarChild

Desk4

handsewn bespoke digital audio

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The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club