Airwindows

ADClip8

TL;DW: ADClip8 is the ultimate Airwindows loudenator/biggenator.

The last time we saw an Airwindows ADClip, the full version rather than a neat and tidy stripped-down version, was October 8… of 2017. It’s been more than six years since the king of loudenators saw an update, in part because ClipOnly got followed by ClipOnly2, which was such a good high-sample-rate clipper that it was all I needed for years. ClipOnly2 is still the cleanest, purest way to take small amounts of peak clipping to your signal: it’s great as a safety clip.

But, while working on a new version tailored to the needs of Final Cut Pro (which is also coming), something new arose.

What would happen if the FCP version, which has a built-in slew clip and makes heavy use of Golden Ratios to arrive at its results, was adapted to a new ADClip? What if it was scaled to regular clipping levels, given a ceiling control to dial back its maximum to taste, what would happen if it was stacked up with a whole array of FinalClips in series like some of the other Airwindows plugins like to do? We’re no longer dealing with ClipOnly2. Much like the original ADClip7, we’re adding extra stuff and running a more complicated algorithm. But we’ve still got some of the special features of ADClip7, like the gain-matched mode and the Clips Only setting.

Enter ADClip8. It has more settings. They go Normal, Gain Matched, Clip Only… then, Afterburner, Explode, Nuke, Apocalypse, and lastly Apotheosis. No, really! That’s the new settings.

What they represent is added stages, so Normal is a single stage (as is Gain Matched), Clip Only shows you where clips begin, and then the new modes are named for the sounds they produce, at two, three, four, five and six stages of special slew-clipped ClipOnly2 style sample-rate aware clipping. In practice, think ‘bigger, bassier, thicker’ as you continue to add stages. You may not always want to run the full six stages, you might want to voice it to your needs.

The interesting part is how all this affects intersample peaking. Because the process brings in slew clipping and repeated use of the ClipOnly2 algorithm, which resists harsh entry into and exit from a clipped state, dialing up ADClip8 and cranking the gain produces an intensely saturated sound that resists intersample peaking not through filtration, but mechanically. It will literally put in transition samples to resist the intersample peaks from going beyond regular clipping. The more stages, the more thoroughly it resists ‘true peak’.

I would say don’t use this for evil but who am I kidding. If you beat everyone with ‘competitive loudness’ this way, please never expect me to listen to what you did, I’ll be hiding under my bed, regretting everything. :)

For what it’s worth, ‘Apotheosis’ mode should also be a very nice way to do extremely moderate transparent clipping of challenging material: ClipOnly2 will still be more transparent but only sounds like a slightly brighter version of ADClip8 Normal mode. Apotheosis mode simply does more and I wouldn’t blame anybody for preferring it. Hope you like ADClip8!

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
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.
VCV Rack module

Date February 25, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

ShortBuss

TL;DW: ShortBuss chases second harmonic, to add or remove it.

ShortBuss.zip(494k)

This plugin is a little hard to explain, as it doesn’t do normal things.

ShortBuss is a re-imagining of the original ShortBuss, that came before Righteous and perhaps even NC-17. It’s a seed that created a lot of unusual, powerful Airwindows plugins, but it’s taken on new powers in its current incarnation.

It’s all about asymmetry. ShortBuss will try to find imbalance in your waveform: even harmonics, more weight on one side than on the other. When it does, you can turn it up, to further augment that effect. I’ve learned that people are using Righteous to do this, liking the warmth of the bass and not minding the fact that the rest of Righteous doesn’t care for that treatment. So, ShortBuss is there to specialize in that effect if you want it.

Second harmonic can be hard to hear, and this is not an EQ, or even a saturation in any normal sense. So it might be a bit tricky to hear, but that’s what it’s doing (you will probably notice higher peaks if you do that, as well).

But there’s more: this time, you can apply reverse ShortBuss. Not only ShortBuss, but backwards! And then it’ll fight even harmonics. It’ll try to take them away. This might clean up the low end very slightly (it’s not really set up to act like an EQ, what it takes from one polarity it’ll put on the other).

More interestingly, it might make for an interesting bass-conditioner. Like on a guitar going to heavy distortion. Or a bass-heavy mix heading to loudenation. It will do a conditioning effect that most likely doesn’t exist elsewhere, because this is such a strange and hard to explain effect that it’s unmarketable and can only exist in the world of open source and/or Airwindows.

But then there’s even more… because that same conditioning has eerie similarities to what might happen on the steel of a plate reverb when you bring the damper in real close, physically suppressing its lower frequencies in a way that’s beyond simple EQ…

ShortBuss is yours to play with, but it’s also a neat addition to my toolbox, and I’m looking forward to using it in some unexpected places to bring sounds that aren’t like usual sounds. I have no idea if you’ll like it, but there’s probably about three people who’ll absolutely love it, and that’s good enough for me. Enjoy :)

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
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.
VCV Rack module

Date February 18, 2024
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

kCathedral2

TL;DW: kCathedral2 is a giant reverby space modeled after the Bricasti Cathedral.

kCathedral2.zip(641k)

Here we go: this should do nicely.

This is still a 5×5 Householder matrix like the last time, but that’s about the only similarity, and it’s not at all the same matrix as last time. I am keeping that as kCathedral because I know full well that people find uses for things, but you can hear pretty plainly in my video on kCathedral2 that this is in another league (as they will all be, going forward).

How was that done? A lot of it was time spent generating possible reverb matrices. There’s a wide array of ways to evaluate how those become reverbs, none of which existed when I made the original kCathedral. I knew what I wanted but I had no way to measure it… and no way to generate thousands, millions, billions of possible options and automate the process of throwing out the metallic or lame ones. And that changed, over months of work on the tools.

There’s also new things that didn’t exist in the more purist, uncompromising kCathedral. The new one uses one of my reverb delays differently, by turning it into a single solitary allpass (well, two, one per channel) and also adding the very subtlest of modulation to just that one allpass (not inside it, as a separate effect). None of this was present in the original, but even though it’s only the tiniest amount, it’s felt.

But most of all, this time around it’s using a completely different approach to early reflections. The real Bricasti Cathedral uses early reflections so strong I mistook them for dry signal being let in. Original kCathedral used a 3×3 matrix, very gingerly, trying not to be obvious because I thought I was hearing dry energy off the Bricasti, therefore the early reflections had to be much quieter, right? kCathedral2 uses a 4×4 matrix… which means it’s able to literally use a patch from ClearCoat/CloudCoat, except without regeneration (the sound literally bounces away into the cathedral and doesn’t even enter the deep reverb field). That’s early reflections that can stand alone as their own reverb.

It’s subtle, but it’s also where I was able to step away from the Bricasti sound and try to establish my own. I think you’ll find that the deep room tone is about the same, and the depth of space, but I want those early reflections to be a lot more diffuse (but NOT allpassy), so I’ve scaled them up and spread them out. It should sound more like detail in the actual room rather than an obvious back wall, which I think will be more useful for how I’ll be using it. And I’ve got a lot closer to that textural butter-sound of the real Bricasti, while retaining some of my own goals for the project.

Welcome to kCathedral2. Oops, I did it again (this time more like what I intended for the first time). Thanks to my Patreon patrons, who are literally the reason I can persist at goals like this, and without whom I might have to stop halfway and not get to stuff like this. Hope you like it!

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
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.
VCV Rack module

Date February 11, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

CloudCoat

TL;DW: CloudCoat is an array of blur effects with a taste for evil.

CloudCoat.zip(594k)

Welcome back to the dark side of Airwindows!

CloudCoat starts as an experiment. What if there was ClearCoat (a bank of small reverbs) except all the delays were allpasses?

Okay, so a bit of explanation: allpasses are like reverb parts, but they make stuff sound smeary and blurred, like bloom reverbs. I’ve got a bloom reverb, MV, which is just a stack of allpasses. Most of my recent work is about avoiding allpasses completely by using reverb matrixes that give me LOTS of echo returns, impossible numbers, so I don’t have to cheat with allpasses. This kind of works and kind of doesn’t (work in progress, see my recent livestreams). But what would happen if you took what was clearly a reverb, and just replaced all the delays with allpasses?

That’s ClearCoat and CloudCoat. The idea was I could give a completely different texture, but using literally all the same reverb constants, and then I could hear what it was like. I expected it to be more a cloudy, diffuse texture, hence ‘cloudcoat’.

You might notice one difference right away: ClearCoat sounds a lot roomier. That’s because it’s designed with a little bit of feedback to fill it out. Sustain, if you will. It’s also way more spacious, and way more metallic and ringy. This is in line with how it only uses delays, and is all part of the research.

CloudCoat with sustain all the way off, is quite different. Depth and spaciousness is almost gone, but there’s no metallicness either. It’s like essence of fake artificial reverb blur. Remember, this too is a 4×4 Householder matrix: it’s a complicated pile of allpasses, not something primitive like MV. I think it might find uses on pads or ambient sounds, or could be used to feed into ClearCoat at the same ‘select’ setting to create a more powerful room sound. With sustain all the way off, you can do many polite and nice things with CloudCoat.

Then, throw it on some drums and turn the sustain up and ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE :)

CloudCoat is applying a kind of nonlinear reverb, like your classic ‘nonlin’ gated verb settings, but Airwindowsized. I’m allowing feedback, but of the four ‘channels’ of Householder feedback, each is also modulated by the output of the one next to it (a totally different sound)… WITHOUT smoothing. So the feedback is broken up by four banks of allpass output and cranked up to the point of meltdown, and that’s CloudCoat. It disrupts the signal wildly and fiercely.

Why?

Because I tried it, on a livestream, and the drums absolutely exploded like nothing I’ve ever heard. There’s rasp and rattle and an effect much like extreme compression while in a stone drum room, but there’s no compression and no stone room. It just makes that sound. Instead of making it out of compressed, flat-topped compression smash, it’s making the madness happen INSIDE the sound, meaning you can make it brutal and unbearable with ClearCoat and THEN loudenate it, unlike any other sort of compression or distortion. CloudCoat adds a whole new type of trash that is dynamic with your sound (again, nonlin) and automatically dials itself back if the source energy level does. It’s a huge, nasty, energy-laden meltdown that can be escalated to pretty much any degree… and then dialed back down again, to pretty much any level of controllability, so long as you’re using it on noisy percussion and as long as you’re okay with its signature trash-sound, which is not like anything else and which is independent of added compression and distortion.

And then you can do blur/texture effects with the sustain on 0. Just don’t bother trying to make it work with tiny amounts of sustain: it basically can’t. 0 or trash are your only options, and then there is a universe of trash and meltdown if trash you choose.

But seriously, why?

Because it makes me laugh with delight when snares go off like something out of the imagination of Trent Reznor. I don’t know what to tell you. Enjoy CloudCoat, if it’s the kind of thing you enjoy.

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
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.
VCV Rack module

Date February 4, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

Chris

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CloudCoat

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