Airwindows

Mastering2

TL;DW: Mastering2 is Airwindows style, and can do elliptical EQ now!

Mastering2 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Subtlety’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Mastering2.zip (609k) standalone(AU, VST2)

This update to Mastering adds the control at the top, which is elliptical EQ, and defaults to zero like Glue does. Not hard to explain: it cuts bass in the side channel, as if you were mastering a vinyl record, though this has uses in nearly any stereo environment. Below a sufficiently low frequency, stereo bass becomes meaningless if it’s stereo enough. Purely out of phase stuff will cancel out.

High time I put it out: been working on the reverbs so much that I have to dig into the backlog for a proper plugin. It’s also funny that the addition of Sidepass makes yet another control where it’s quite hard to hear what it’s doing. Mastering in general is a plugin all about doing little subtle hard-to-hear corrections, or dialing things in using Airwindows Meter. For instance, if you see red spikes on the slew section of Meter, Glue on this will let you control those without damaging apparent high-end. Scope lets you boost or ease back on detail again without apparently changing ‘treble’, and Girth enhances or eases back sub hugeness without apparently changing ‘bass’ that much.

Then there’s Drive which really doesn’t act much like a saturation because it is really Airwindows Zoom, except in a multi-band version that applies to the ‘EQ bands’, except they’re actually Kalman filters. And of course there’s dither, but it’s for modern formats so it is all to 24 bit. To the extent you can even register that, it goes in rough order of ‘how much excitement and brightness and focus there is’, up to Bypass which lets full floating point audio pass.

You should probably run this in conjunction with Airwindows Meter, because it’s all about massaging peak energy and ‘invisible transients’ to shape them exactly the way you want. My idea there was to be able to maximize that type of ‘invisible’ audio for the greatest possible effect, and I use Meter to observe what’s happening rather than just trying to vibe it. The hope is, tuning that stuff just right, produces audio that immediately sounds correct, whether the obvious parts are loud or soft, bright or dark. It’s not a replacement for remixing: I don’t consider mastering to be doing the same things as mixing but differently. Mastering should be tailoring the spell cast by the mixer, and that’s what Mastering2 is all about.

Won’t work for everybody, but for those who appreciate this plugin, having an invisible elliptical filter in there is probably a great upgrade. It all runs on the 64-bit dithered-to-32 floating point buss, so that’s one more area you can dial in to be just right, within the plugin’s processing. It ought to interact with Girth very nicely.

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
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.

Date June 8, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

AngleFilter

TL;DW: AngleFilter is the synth-style extension of AngleEQ.

AngleFilter in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Filter’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
AngleFilter.zip (500k) standalone(AU, VST2)

So while I do stuff like make new forms of reverb (going from 5×5 matrices to 6×6!) and try to invent genres of music, there’s this funny little filter…

AngleFilter is an offshoot of AngleEQ, which was too strange by itself but ended up turning into the EQs used in PointyGuitar and ChimeyGuitar. This is probably why those can get weird when you set the controls too strangely, and AngleFilter gets even weirder. It was meant to be a nonresonant filter, just a very steep brickwall type thing, but instead it does crazy things with phase around the cutoff, and grows steeper and more intense the more you lower that cutoff.

Since it was so untameable I just put a full-on waveshaper on the output, so its excesses won’t blow up to huge dB spikes. There’s a Hard control, and what it does is it makes life hard for you in setting the other controls. Mostly it goes insane over lower bassy settings, but it can be set to produce a dull roar at higher frequencies too, and the whole design of the plugin is for letting you modulate the cutoff hyper-aggressively without problems.

I’m working on things like very serious reverb upgrades, but sometimes you just gotta have fun too :)

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
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.

Date May 25, 2025
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

ChimeyGuitar

TL;DW: ChimeyGuitar is a supremely compressible instrument amp.

ChimeyGuitar in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Amp Sims’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
ChimeyGuitar.zip (526k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Here’s a followup to PointyGuitar. What if, instead of distort, the imaginary amp compressed?

The tone stack works the same: in fact, it’s exactly as it was in PointyGuitar, as is the cab simulation (a highpass and lowpass made out of AngleEQ, which is able to be very resonant and colorful). That’s on purpose. I want it to be familiar, so the way the tone shaping works is exactly like PointyGuitar, and if you can dial one in, you can dial the other.

But instead of the basic distortion as found in ‘FireAmp’, what’s there? BeziComp. Not even a normal compressor, no, it’s the new experimental one that turns the amplification factor into a Bezier curve… but BeziComp has one instance of itself in play. ChimeyGuitar?

ChimeyGuitar has eight, at full crank.

Stacking compressors like this isn’t unheard of: the FMR Really Nice Compressor has ‘Super Nice’ mode, which cascades three compressors in series. It’s just that ChimeyGuitar does eight, of a new design which I don’t think existed until I started it. That also means it’s on me to sort out what the strengths and weaknesses of this new kind of compression are, seeing as we have as many as eight of them in between every EQ stage now.

First, it can react very quickly, but refuses to alias since it will not apply a volume ‘corner’ above its minimum radius. This matters less used inside ChimeyGuitar because plugins like this repeatedly filter out aliasing harmonics anyhow, but it’s significant because usually as you have compression kick in you hear continued interaction between the sound, and the speed of attack. That lets you dial in a squished, unvarying sound by hearing that overtone as if it was a form of distortion (which it is), but BeziComp and ChimeyGuitar don’t have any of that compression artifact at all.

Instead, you’ll hear an odd warble when you push ChimeyGuitar too far. It’s similar to when you’re using DeRez3: while Bezier curves can sound like a brickwall filter, there’s an strange resonance associated with it. In a compressor, when pushed hard, we hear this as tremblings of the loudness, as if trying to squish the signal makes it more jittery. It can come off like an old Arp Pro Soloist trying to imitate a trombone, but the thing to bear in mind is that you can always back off the Compres control until it cleans up again. The transparency of BeziComp means it’ll clean up a whole bunch while still being compressed.

This is my go-to for articulate guitars and basses that don’t seem to have saturation or distortion. It’s got the flexibility of PointyGuitar, but super clean, or with strange new forms of saturation that are like derezzing. 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
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.

Date May 18, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

kCosmos

TL;DW: kCosmos is infinite space ambient, or titanic hall.

kCosmos in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
kCosmos.zip (624k) standalone(AU, VST2)

It’s not the first time I’ve tried to make a space ambient type reverb, but there are a number of firsts here nevertheless.

kCosmos uses the 5×5 Householder matrix design I’ve used in recent reverbs like kGuitarHall, but rather than just finding a new arrangement of delays, it’s riding a wave of new developments in reverb development. Rather than taking days to evaluate ten or a hundred thousand possible reverbs before critical listening, I revamped the program I was using, to hundreds of MILLIONS per night. Since the method is not unlike the genetic algorithm in that it’s trying variations against fitness functions, this wildly improved tone quality.

I went from evaluating recurring delay lengths based on where they were in the reverb tail, to mapping out spacings between echo returns, and evaluating the distribution of these spacings. This changed the whole texture of the reverbs from ‘artifical’ to more of a natural, invisible spaciousness that blends in better.

And I went from running an extra 3×3 matrix just for early reflections, to running no early reflections at all, to running a whole other parallel unfiltered 5×5 matrix… JUST for early reflections. That’s the EarlyRF slider, which can be used in conjuction with Dry/Wet, predelay, and the Filter control, to help transition from the raw sounds to the deep reverb space.

I’ve added an FIR brickwall filter for the main regenerating section (though not inside the regeneration) and worked out my own sinc interpolation, and have a plugin coming along those lines, and used it for the regenerating filter section. I’ve included a simple averaging for non-full-crank settings of this filter, so kCosmos can switch on the fly between extended highs at infinite sustain, and a maximal-depth version that gradually loses highs in a way that sounds like distance.

And I’ve refined the concept of ‘gradually restraining the infinite sustain when new audio is coming in’, so that in normal use as an infinite verb, you can layer stuff all day without the reverb running away with you. It’s so effective that subtle noises can have a slight feedback bias: when you start with very quiet layers, they will creep up in volume to about -18 dB total, at which point they’ll balance. So it’s an infinite reverb specifically designed for live performace as an ambient musician doing deep space explorations, and it’ll adapt to the way you play audio into it.

And lastly it has both CreamCoat style undersampling, and CrunchCoat style, at the same time. Meaning, set to full crank it uses the CreamCoat method for applying Bezier undersampling without artifacts, and as soon as you go away from Derez of 1.0, it switches to the continuous adjustment range of CrunchCoat, sometimes described as ‘cursed digital derezzing’. Except this time, the Derez control is control-smoothed, and use of the filter tends to mask the ‘cursed’ quality completely. It’s just that the giant reverbing space can be cleanly pitched up and down as you go, or dropped to an eerie rumble and murmur.

There will be further experiments, but kCosmos stakes out a position as the most epic (and playable) Airwindows reverb. 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
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.

Date May 11, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

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