Cabs
TL;DW: Cabs is an Airwindows guitar speaker cabinet simulator.
I think you should listen to this plugin :)
I’ve been asked for ITB guitar plugins before. Never been all that interested, because I like real amps and real tubes etc: have never found a lot of enthusiasm for going to great lengths to digitally fake all the colorations of some amp/speaker or other, because when the soul’s not there the color is irrelevant.
This is different. I took on the challenge of updating my old Cabs plugin: originally dynamically convolved cab impulses, except they hadn’t been MADE with that in mind so it became a series of wild experiments. I wasn’t happy… then.
Cabs completely overhauled everything I’d attempted. It’s undersampled, so it’ll run on whatever sample rate you like, efficiently. It’s got the same tricks of allowing you to heighten the particular speaker coloration it uses, or dial it right back to nothing.
But around that core is a completely different approach to getting ITB amp tones. I’m using the cab size and ‘room loud’ controls to let you dial in the exact presentation you want, from clear and up front power-soaked clearness to complete wall-of-stacks meltdown, and beyond (in classic Airwindows fashion). This is done through an alternate approach to loudness emulation based on the destruction of audio signals through ultimate volume, such as a Space Shuttle takeoff, and what happens to the waveforms there.
I think you should listen to it. Careful that you don’t jump for odd settings right away and get confused: for instance, settings of Room Loud beyond say 0.6 are not really real-world things. Settings of the cab tone intensity beyond 0.6 or 0.7 might be a bit weird. The way the cabs take on character and intensity is related to cab size: everything is basically related to everything else. You have to know what sound you’re trying to get, to clone something real-world. This is not a preset box, at all, at all. You have to be a real guitar tone maven to dial this in to convincing amp clone territory.
OR… or… or!
You can use the range of adjustment here, with the controls that give you a basic idea of ‘what you’re doing and how you want it’, combined with for instance Edge or the upcoming Dirt plugin (softer saturation) to get tones that DO NOT EXIST but act like real amps in significant ways. You can get tones that you can’t get in the real world, and dial them in to match what’s in your head: in some cases maybe to a point that the real world amps couldn’t reach.
And track through them because the whole rig (when using entirely Airwindows plugins) runs NO LATENCY, so it’ll feel as close as it can to the real thing, and respond with electric immediacy.
And then unlike any real amp situation… once you’ve got the final mix done, you can wiggle any of these parameters to where they need to be for THE SONG and tune the tones to best suit whatever else is there, even if it didn’t exist when you were tracking it. This is a freedom of the DAW experience (don’t go too overboard, make decisions!) and it might bring you the results you need.
And all of this can be lightly applied to any other tone: real genuine amp-and-cab that was tracked too quietly or didn’t pick up enough mojo, synths, drums, you name it!
I think you should listen to this plugin. It makes a lot of new things possible and it is free, because I am Patreon-supported and use that to pay the bills and keep myself working full-time on all this.
It’s going to be double-time, too, because I’ve got the results from my testing (anyone who knows my Soundcloud can check this out, download the tracks for 24/96 at https://soundcloud.com/airwindows). I don’t believe long double gains you anything over double, but both are significantly different that using floats for everything, and it’s not all that subtle. And so I am overhauling my entire codebase and redoing ALL the plugins, as straight up double precision, for (on Intel) nearly twice the performance… and overhauling everything that is out of date or uses poor coding practices, while I’m at it. This will affect Linux, for instance: I’ve got a change that will lead to significantly less audio thread blocking from Linux’s rand() call, and everywhere this will give you performance boosts even outside of Linux. It is a colossal task. I hope you folks like the results, which will take more than weeks but less than months, I think.
I’ll be getting back to work now, thanks for hearing me out and I hope you like Cabs :)
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.
Chris, been meaning to ask you for a while: ever thought about making a simple reverse delay effect? A really overlooked effect and there are very few simple plugs for it anywhere, not to mention simple and low-CPU. I’d love it if you could consider it. Bless you and long live Airwindows!
Never ceasing to impress. Legend!
Hi Chris! I love your plugins! And thank you for supporting Linux!
I have a request – a version of TremoSquare that syncs to the beat/tempo.
The LFO works, but I’d like to be able to sync divisions of the beat: quarter, eighth, or 16th note, straight or triplet.
I use it to approximate tremolo strings. It works great!
SUPER LEGEND MASTER….
This plugin is legendary… REALLY nice tone… super flexible! Impressive and compared to another (awesome) developer… Your CAB plugin is light years ahead!!
Just confused wheather “size” knob does anything… but man oh man.. You killed it… STUPIDLY GOOD!!!!
Now let me try convince the Surge Team to implement it!
I’m getting a 10-12db volume drop when I turn cabs on even with output at 1 (Windows 64 bit VST). Am I using it wrong?
Hi!
Thanks for everything!
I tried cabs but in Reaper i have a huge volume drop along with no filtering like i don`t have a cab on my amp, but in Gig performer no volume drop but still the same effect..i hear the controls somehow but the sound is harsh like the cab isn`t working..
Cheers!!
I’m getting a massive volume drop and the cab type slider doesn’t do anything. Something is wrong here. Running Reaper on Windows.
Really cool, now make us a few amp Sims :)
Cabs is working for me now (on Win64), the cab models are sounding so different and distinct. I like it. Thank you Chris :) .
Beloved Chris,
I hope this message reaches you again somehow, and thanks for all the quality work. Especially Cabs. But i keep running into this same question. what does cabsize do and why does room sound not nice type of distorted and clipped?
I’ve watched the video and read the description a few times… I’m just not understanding or hearing what size does… can you just tell me please.. Its driving me nuts! LOL
Is cabsize maybe related only to stereo width? I expect the whole eq and resonance to be altered when the dimensions of a thing changes.lol but its not that i want the plugin to work as I expect it, its that i cant FIGURE OUT what it does! Was the plugin meant to be DRIVEN because i can hear it saturate a bit when i boost into it? I imagine that i hear the room knob bringing in some presence when cabs is fed with fireamp?
For context, I use it on tons of distorted non guitar, non high gain stuff along with your amp series wich i find to be yet another airwindows treasure.
That said, thanks for all you do… its kind of insane how much mileage THE WHOLE PLANET is getting out of your plugins