Baxandall
TL;DW: Baxandall is a killer general-purpose EQ.
This was going to be next week, but Compresaturator2 was broken. Sooooo… we’re gonna skip ahead and do THE killer EQ of 2020, before 2020 is actually here!
Baxandall is a configuration of analog parts for making a flexible and great-sounding EQ, noted for very gentle musical slopes. It’s said that in digital, Baxandall is nothing more than a type of Q, much like Butterworth, and every one is like every other one.
And that would be nonsense, because this is Airwindows Baxandall, and it wipes the floor with other things bearing this name, because it does lots of weird and wonderful things under the hood that make it quantitatively different. And people can do as good as this… by taking the open source code under the MIT license and crediting me. I don’t believe anyone can get close using ordinary filter-designer textbook stuff, no matter how they dress it up or what distortions they add to be ‘analog’. (Airwindows Baxandall doesn’t distort.)
Baxandall starts with a two-band filter that, zeroed out, subtracts an inverse lowpass from a lowpass and gives you bit-identical, perfectly transparent sound. That’s if you’re being subtle. If you boost or cut, lows or highs, it gives you the gentle broad boosts you expect, centered on the vital midrange. As you get more intense with the boosting, it gets more extreme, to where if you’re doing double boosts to get an intense exaggerated sound, a mids notch will naturally develop to accentuate the boosting. The whole voicing shifts to accomodate what you want to do with it, and you can play bass against treble or vice versa to get really wild voicings, such as for extreme EQ treatments (in terms of lows or highs)… but using the same natural Airwindows Baxandall tonality, so it won’t sound ‘filtery’, it’ll sound like it was meant to be that way.
Airwindows Baxandall uses my interleaved biquad filters (original, purest form, not meant for rapid automation) that run inside a Console5 instance to deepen the sound of the filter. It is truly unlike any other digital filter, ‘Baxandall’ or otherwise. It’ll be one of the first picks for when I start putting together curated lists of ‘use these ones’ plugins, one of the first things I’ll grab for if I’m livestreaming ITB mixing to show people how I’d approach that, one of the most important plugins in the whole collection.
You can have it. Merry Xmas and happy any and all other holidays.
If you’d like to give me anything to celebrate us all getting to a new year, there’s always Patreon. I hope you like Baxandall as much as I do :)
You’re a hero, a saint and a legend, Chris. I’m finally in a financial situation where I’ve joined your patreon, and plan to level up my membership in time. Thank you for your work you guru! and have a beautiful new year.
Wooooooow this is badasss!
Amazing! You’re the best, Chris! See you in 2020!
… Chris, I honestly hope that in a few years you’re gonna’ be up in a mansion with 21 year old bikini wearing girls serving you hummus and pears … YOU really are important to the music world.
Hi Chris Im having issues trying to download your pluggins especially totape5. They all say unable to find application to open document and wants me to go to the App Store. I have a macbook pro 10.9.5 running mavericks. Do you know what the problem may be??
This one looks to be good at pulling down the mids and low mids even at default setting
Merry Christmas ! and thank you , Chris .
Very very nice one. One of my favs.
A Dynamic-Eq -Option would be a perfect complement for this.
This is perfect. You can take away lot of high frequences without sounding reduced. Or boost without sounding boosted. It’s magic.
Default settings sound flatter now, but there is a very very slight boost at 2Khz now (visible on vst analyser)
I guess its something to do with the way the filters interact?
That said, if your using a eq plugging why would you set it to flat ;-)
Hey
“(Airwindows Baxandall doesn’t distort.)”
^ I think you wrote that part of the description before adding in the PurestConsole stuff, because Airwindows Baxandall definitely adds distortion. The distortion is lowest when the Output slider is all the way to the left and highest when the Output slider is all the way to the right. Maybe that Output slider should be called Input
I am absolutely in love with this plugin, but I’d really like to run it in M/S mode, does anyone have a neat little trick I can use this plugin to boost only the sides on, for example, a full mix?
Hey Chris, just looking at the code… whats the deal with the two biquads running in parallel on different samples? What does this achieve? Seems rather unusual.
It is! It’s interleaving. Among other things it makes the filter slope shallower. It’s a take on trying to process samples in pairs rather than one at a time :)