Silhouette

TL;DW: Silhouette replaces the sound with raw noise sculpted to match its dynamics.

Silhouette.zip(588k)

I thought I’d let people play with the precursor to Texturize, which so far has not made it into the Patreon era of Airwindows… meet Silhouette!

I know what you’re asking. “Why does this plugin look like a busted Subaru in a snowstorm?” And the answer is, it doesn’t: I had a car crash (and did not die! And only blew out a tire, and didn’t go head-on into a truck or anything!) and the busted Subaru is from that. I’ve got it back on the road now, this time with snow tires just in time to absolutely not need them :) and that is purely a side issue and some of why I suddenly stopped constant livestreaming.

Silhouette is not a busted Subaru. It is a busted PLUGIN :D And what it was for is, playing finished music through and seeing if you could still make out a beat. It was an anti-loudness-war plugin, made long ago to illustrate that point. And it replaces the whole sound with a blast of noise which retains the dynamics of the underlying music… if there is any. Dynamics, that is.

Texturize was this, tone-shaped to match the sound of the underlying music (mostly going a lot more bassy). And Texturize proved a lot of fun for people, some of whom asked, can we have that but brighter? So be careful what you wish for. Silhouette now comes with the same wet/dry control as Texturize, so you can use it as a subliminal noise generator. But it’s ALL bright, so you have to turn it down further in order for it to ‘hide’ behind the audio. And that means it can’t really do what Texturize does: it’ll stick out.

But in sticking out, the subliminals it will generate are VERY different from what Texturize does. I’d describe it as hype and energy and tension. Be careful not to turn it up too high: it’ll be incredibly obvious anytime you do. Some sounds, some mixes, will just never work with it.

But isn’t it fun sometimes to not care about that and just try out something wild to see what it does? Silhouette finds its use in that space. I hope you like it.

In other news, though I’m not chasing the livestream thing at the moment (I can occasionally get back into that, I think, just not this last week) I’ve got some plans underway. I’m actively moving towards releasing all the plugins in Raspberry Pi compatible form (thankfully, if this works at all it’ll be a lot more straightforward than the big plugin overhaul of 2022) and have been asked to do more in the line of Evergreens content and how to get classic tones (guitar, bass, drums, keys, what have you). I believe this will be more appropriately done in edited-youtube-video form, so I will need to learn Final Cut Pro and select bands (Steely Dan comes to mind) that aren’t fighting react-channel usage so I can show people how the records are made and play original vinyl so you can hear the real mixes as they are meant to be heard. I’ll work on this, and will continue putting out plugins :)

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.