Airwindows

Weave

TL;DW: Weave is a fancy overdrive with a good texture.

Weave.zip (515k) standalone(AU, VST2)
Weave in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Saturation’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

There’s been a lineage of Airwindows custom overdrives. The most basic overdrive is based on the sin() function, and that’ll get you the softest, fattest distortion where harmonics are added one at a time, not all at once as with hard clipping. There’s more recent experiments like Longhand, designed to do exactly what sin() does but with no possible optimizations, instead plotting one continuing equation around the sine curve.

Want more? Spiral was based on the sine, but with a twist, gain staging the saturation based on how loud the signal was. This isn’t compression, because it’s not using a time factor and just uses the input sample directly. Spiral gives you a leaner body to the sound, its saturation curve steepening as it gets closer to complete distortion. More of a bark to it, edgier, but still one continuous equation.

Weave takes one further step, another layer of fancy. Where Spiral scales things by the input, attenuating way down for quiet sounds so there’s next to no clipping and then putting the gain back post saturation, Weave steps back in the direction of thick and fat in a novel way: taking the square root of the control signal. What this does is put that ‘pre-saturation gain’ part back towards sin() again, softening the overdrive up, but the very center is still cleaned up and leaned out. It produces a full-sounding overdrive that isn’t tubby and overfat like straignt sin() can be, and the saturation curve is still one unbroken algorithm, but the lean part is more towards the center and the quiet stuff, much like I did in TapeHack.

Then, to top it off, Weave uses the derivative trick I came up with to suppress high frequencies near Nyquist, the one that isn’t elliptic BLEP aliasing removal, but instead just sort of interacts with the frequencies and alters them. What I found designing this was, the technique stopped brittle highs from coming forward under high gain distortion. I’ve been using it for things and am happy with the sound.

All this combines into Weave to produce a saturation with a lot of character and flavor. You can run great tones into it and not diminish their quality, even though the harmonics come right out and make it obvious saturation is present. It doesn’t get bloated, but it holds onto whatever thickness your sound has. It doesn’t get bright or gritty, but it hangs onto detail very very well.

Weave became the default saturation in my video-making vocal chain. It became the saturation in ConsoleX3, beating out TapeHack for that purpose. And it’s available standalone now, in the ‘X filters’ configuration where if the input drive is at 0.1 that’s unity gain: this gives you ten times the gain if you want it, upwards of 18dB boost, and Weave can stand up to that pretty much no matter what kind of sound you have.

Hope you like Weave :)

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 32-bit Pi
download Pi5VSTs.zip for 64-bit 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.

Date November 8, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

PunchyDeluxe

TL;DW: PunchyDeluxe is a smoother form of PointyDeluxe.

PunchyDeluxe.zip (537k) standalone(AU, VST2)
PunchyDeluxe in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Amp Sims’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

As demonstrated when demoing Echojam: when I couldn’t use a real guitar DI or amp, I reached for an unreleased plugin. PunchyDeluxe is basically just like PointyDeluxe, except there’s just a little bitty difference.

Instead of the fairly simple, efficient clipping algorithm in PointyDeluxe… PunchyDeluxe uses Longhand. The FULL Longhand, calculated in long double… but then with my ‘derivative BIP’ aliasing manipulation code, the stuff that causes high frequency artifacts not to come forward. Used on what’s basically a turbocharged sin() function already, which already doesn’t generate high frequency artifacts much.

If you’re not familiar with PointyDeluxe, apologies. Even I find this one awkward to use. PointyGuitar is better behaved, but PointyDeluxe needs you to keep the sliders pretty close to each other: any striking jump in settings might produce a crazy resonant boost. It’s very fussy. But it gives you a granularity you can’t get with the more approachable plugin… and PunchyDeluxe gives you that with a totally different, wildly more expensive in CPU saturation algorithm.

PunchyDeluxe also doesn’t have the speaker simulation built into PointyGuitar, but that’s available in Cabs2, or as the highpass and lowpass in ConsoleX2 and ConsoleX3. However, you might find use for it without cabinet simulation, in case you want wild pungent saturations on something that isn’t even a guitar: as always, there’s no such thing as misusing this stuff, it’s only about whether it works for you. It’s possible PunchyDeluxe is too CPU-expensive to work for you, but you can have it anyhow :)

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 32-bit Pi
download Pi5VSTs.zip for 64-bit 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.

Date November 1, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Echojam

TL;DW: Echojam is an echo effect that is secretly a reverb.

Echojam.zip (575k) standalone(AU, VST2)
Echojam in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Ambience’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

This doesn’t have to be the guitar effect, but it totally can be!

The idea is, do an echo effect like in many Pink Floyd, U2 etc etc. records, but instead of using a delay, use a strange failed reverb that gathers all the early delays into a single clump, like a slapback echo. This is because I started getting strange failed reverbs that were trying to be single echoes but blurring them. Rather than immediately fix it, I thought ‘what if this could be echojam?’

And it totally can.

If you use a lot of regeneration, it will absolutely turn into a reverb wash. If you pick certain Select options (there are 17) you’ll get a wild stereo effect, but it’s no simple ping-pong. What you get is a scattering of 256 individual echoes not really lining up, not doing anything specific in stereo, but often doing very striking things in stereo.

There is basically no proper speed control so that can’t be adjusted. There is a speed control, but it’s sample-locked Bezier undersampling, so it’s got an okay tone (still a little odd when very undersampled) but there are only so many positions you can use. Not only that, there is no adjustment for sample rate this time, so you’ll be setting it based on your sample rate meaning if you’re at 96k (or 192k!) you’ll have more speed options because they are subdivisions of the native sample rate. If you’re at 44.1k you probably still have working echojam times on tap.

Not only that, all the options have faintly different delay times because it works off the strange failed reverbs, not by design. So you have to echojam based on what you hear, because there’s no specified tempo or even specific tempo: it’s always some form of blur! A little like SoftClock, but in the form of an echojam.

But if you can get it to gel, you’ve got a very lush spacey echojam that really fills up the space with detail, stereo event, and spatiality totally beyond a simple delay no matter how nice its texture is. And of course you can use it as a slapback (especially if you’re at high sample rate and it can run real fast) or as a slow dark messy echo on something less rhythmic. You can even get it to do the trick where it makes a big roaring swoop up to a rhythmic sound at the (approximate) delay rate, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a better choice for that… assuming you can get it to the right delay speed, or alternately tune your rhythmic thing until it matches Echojam.

Echojam ought to be a lot of fun for those who know. And now you know :)

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 32-bit Pi
download Pi5VSTs.zip for 64-bit 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.

Date October 25, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

VerbSevens

TL;DW: VerbSevens is a calibrated reference reverb plugin for reverb matrices.

VerbSevens.zip (619k) standalone(AU, VST2)
VerbSevens in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

Here’s a tool I use often, updated to keep pace with where my development’s been heading. (also, a person brought up something happening with VerbSixes that I could make better, but I doubt he expected THIS much better)

For years now, I’ve been developing reverbs along specific lines. I’ve never been a fan of allpass filters, unless they’re MV (my take on a classic bloom effect that’s made only out of allpass filters). I think they’re smeary and don’t actually sound deep, just blurred. I want to be able to make reverbs out of only comb filters, out of only delays, because that’s what real reverbs are made of: you just can’t have that many echoes, so people do their allpasses and other things to approximate the sound.

But what if you could have that many echoes?

A classic way to build up echo density is with a Householder matrix. It’s 4×4 so you need sixteen delays, but you get 256 echoes from just those sixteen delays, and better still, you can run them all either directly or inverted with no other gain changes. You get a matrix where if you feed the output back into the input, it gives you infinite sustain without any frequency running away. And feedback multiplies the echoes more, so it can get super dense for you.

But what about other matrixes? Turns out there’s math for Householder matrices of all sizes. If you use 25 delays, you can make a 5×5 matrix, where some of the mixing paths are times 3 and some are times negative 2. That gives you 3125 echoes before feedback, which is a lot more. On the other hand, some of your reverb paths are louder than the others, but only somewhat. Then there’s a 6×6 Householder matrix. There’s math for it, but now the diagonal path is twice as loud as the other paths, undermining the effectiveness… but now you have 46,656 distinct echoes. Before feedback. What could be better than that? (and this can be heard in VerbSixes, by the way)

Enter the Conference Matrix. It’s a 6×6 matrix, and unlike the previous ones, it leaves out one summing path for each section. It’s as if the diagonal path is zero: only five of the delay chains connect to the next stage. But it’s always a different section being left out, so all the information does find its way through… and the big difference is, now all the paths are unity gain again, just with some of them phase-flipped in the manner of a 4×4 Householder matrix.

When you combine one of those 6x6es with a Householder 4×4 to feed it, you’re looking at close to 12 MILLION echoes before feedback… and the regeneration can be infinite without it running away. But VerbSevens is primarily designed to be a test-bed: feed any combination of delays into it and it’ll show you what that does. It just happens to do double duty, as a sort of ginormous reverb pad. How does it sound when it’s doing 12 million echoes over an enormous space?

It sounds very nice. Because of the combination of the 4×4 and 6×6 I selected for it when you’re not compiling it to test things, it works like VerbSixes did, VerbSixes had a few little tweaks intended to produce realistic deep-reverb sounds, though, and they could interact with certain tones in a way that made a noise. VerbSevens no longer tries to do anything of the sort… so it’s a huge reverb, but also an unrealistic one, in that the highs don’t die away or alter. It’s just giant creamy space, turning any noise no matter how percussive into a total wash, and it now does that a lot better than VerbSixes ever could.

Hope you like the new genre ‘reverb and more reverb’, because this is your plugin for making 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 32-bit Pi
download Pi5VSTs.zip for 64-bit 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.

Date October 18, 2026
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

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