TL;DW: BezEQ3 refines the concept into four vivid, unified bands.

BezEQ3.zip (516k) standalone(AU, VST2)
BezEQ3 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Filter’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

Persistence has its rewards…

The idea was to see if BezEQ could be expanded into something I can use in a Console, for which I like having four bands and frequency sweep controls for each. But the delay lines built into BezEQ2 had to go, because I’d also want zero latency… and that would produce a phasier response, perhaps interactions between bands that would make it behave less normally. But normal’s easy to come by, SmoothEQ2 exists, so what if we could get something worth having that’s less normal?

Enter BezEQ3. There’s more improvements on getting it to filter smoothly, there’s that needed 4th band, and the sweepable middle positions to the bands, but it’s still very much BezEQ. It’s refined that unusual tonality down, and is still using a filter topology where, set flat, it’s literally perfectly transparent.

And then it’s perfectly transparent for any other setting, no matter how extreme… but how you GET to those settings is something else.

Because removing the internal delay lines and making it be zero latency, derailed the filter bands in some peculiar way. If you boost a frequency, you’re cutting something else. Everything’s kind of interactive. It’s not going to behave nicely if you think you can treat it like shelving filters with neat markings. No point EVEN marking it. This is not SmoothEQ2, which runs on DF1 biquad filters like a normal plugin.

Instead, you voice it by using the bands and sweeps as suggestions, and you listen to what it’s doing. Nothing will get a frequency band to separate out and act like a ‘frequency band’, and curiously nothing will get frequency bands to come forward or fall back (like FatEQ) either. It acts, more than any other EQ I’ve ever heard or made, like no EQ had been done, and like the sound was that way on recording.

It’s just that you can revoice things to a ridiculous degree and still have it sound like one coherent piece.

This plugin will be very polarizing. You will likely love it or absolutely hate it. I suspect some of the other old-schoolers will like what they hear. I’m almost sure anybody with extensive modern-production expertise will be frustrated and confused. So very many people think in terms of taking all the sounds and decomposing them into distinct pieces and fitting them together like some mixing jigsaw puzzle. What are you going to do with an EQ that refuses to separate out anything, where you can never turn a sound into this band and that band and holes where the bad audio used to be?

Meanwhile, the old school practitioners of mixing black arts are licking their chops and can’t wait to turn a much smaller number of tracks into something huge and compelling… sneakily heightening rawness and energy, without ever seeming like they are EQing. It’s more like voicing. Nothing needs to be aggressive, just voice everything until it hits right and sits in the right places, and the top-to-bottom, left-to-right, mixing jigsaw puzzle can stay in the box. With suitable use of compression and saturation you could use this to mix a whole thing in mono, sounding unequalized, and it’d still hit like a ton of bricks.

BezEQ3 is currently on track to be the primary EQ in ConsoleX3. Many people will just get mad at it, most likely. I’m just gonna have to show people what this is about… but if something happens when you try this plugin, and it gets exactly the sound you crave and you want to use it on everything… well, you know who you are, and you’re welcome :)

A follow-up note: I’ll be working on getting a 64-bit build for the Pi 5, might be leaving the Pi 4 build as 32 bit for the use of even older Pis.

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip for x86
download Pi4VSTs.zip for the Pi 4
download Pi5VSTs.zip for the Pi 5
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.

TL;DW: Suzan is a new type of ladder filter.

Suzan.zip (507k) standalone(AU, VST2)
Suzan in Airwindows Consolidated (a separate project) under ‘Filter’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

So a funny thing happened to me on the way to Dattorro…

I was talking about the very simple state variable filter I made, Dattorro, and how it was very handy, could even substitute for a biquad filter according to Andy from Cytomic who’s an eager advocate of these (as opposed to, say, a biquad filter of direct form 1), and how I’d come up with a twist on it using only a sin() function to do the unexpected thing of subtracting the distorted bandpass element FROM the lowpass, and how that had a neat tone I liked. The twist was new, and I was excited about the possibilities.

Then, on a famously crotchety forum, a guy popped up to object… saying I shouldn’t call it not a biquad. It’s just an SVF and not direct form 1, but it’s still a biquadratic filter. You could even have literal analog filters that are biquads. I had the language wrong and he apologized for the fact that this drove him up the wall.

He’s Antoine Portes, and he’s writing an experimental book about filters called Working Class Filter Design. Biquadratic means the transfer function’s denominator is a quadratic formula, another name for second order polynomial. He’s been trying to do a really good Moog ladder, which apparently is more like fourth order, and he notes that we use Q for resonance, but there’s another part that goes 1/(2*Q) and this doesn’t have a consistent name. He’s calling it Damping, but suggests if you don’t like that you can call it Suzan for all the difference it’ll make to him.

Naturally, I was charmed though his math is over my foolish head :) and so, I got busy again, except it was with experimenting in code rather than figuring out the math of it. And I told him I’d name the filter, meant to be experiments on this fourth-order, Moog-flavored filter, ‘Suzan’ in his honor.

And this is the result. It’s a small stack of SVFs. The difference is, Antoine understandably is interested in representing these things in correct math, and doing sensible things at least some of the time. Me on the other hand… my whole deal is being able to try things that don’t exist yet. By all rights the AIs should be paying me to come up with novel things for them (maybe there’ll come a day when that’s a reality).

And so, Suzan is not two but three SVFs in series. And the SVFs are still normal, except I’m up to my Dattorro tricks but even worse. Stage A subtracts the bandpass of stage C. Stage B subtracts the bandpass of stage A… and stage C adds the bandpass of stage B. Oh, except they’re all the sines of those bandpasses, and the first two are using half the amplitude of the bandpass, the final one which adds is using the full amplitude going into the sine function.

I don’t claim justification for this or an analysis of why it works. Swept way up high it can have high frequency instability when hit with full blast white noise, which I hope doesn’t cause issues (I got it to where it was simply a boost but didn’t blow up). I find it’s a nice chunky resonant peak and even gives appropriate amounts of bass restriction when resonance is turned up… and the inappropriate use of feedback across the stages does a nice job of giving a colorful texture. One I am intimately familiar with both from records, and from owning everything from a MG-1 Concertmate to a Werkstatt to a Sub Phatty. But we’re not calling it that, because it isn’t one of those. It’s Suzan, and it’s trying to bring the right kind of mojo to my filter collection. I hope you like it :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip for x86
download Pi4VSTs.zip for the Pi 4
download Pi5VSTs.zip for the Pi 5
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.