Flutter

TL;DW: Flutter is the most recent Airwindows flutter, standalone.

Flutter.zip(612k)

This is by request. Sometimes you want stuff to go a little unsteady and wobbly, but you don’t want a full-on tape emulation with, like, dubly and everything. (you don’t do heavy metal in dubly, you know.) And so, here is Flutter, standalone!

This is a tricky little algorithm, so let me give some details on what’s happening here. It’s not a vibrato, or even particularly random. Flutter gets its rate of waver, from the input signal coming in. This probably means that if you put a test tone in, you get a regular warble… or maybe even some awkward noise… out. The reason it does this is to react to the input waveform more directly. I realize the input waveform doesn’t directly modsulate tape flutter, but this does, so there you go.

In practice, you get a flutter/warble that stays pretty subtle right up to when it doesn’t. Push it far enough and you get aggressive flutter. Dial it back and it quickly becomes more well-behaved, but it’s still functioning and can do a nice job of destabilizing pitch in a tapelike way. A side effect of this quirky approach is that it runs with low enough (but NOT zero) latency that you can use it on a live instrument. You can sneak it onto a delay send, or reverb send, to give yourself just a little spread and layering to what otherwise sounds digitally flat and flawless. Or you can sit it on regular tracks and just go for that very subtle mulch-tone of old school retro, and use other means to dirty the sound up.

Sometimes it’s handy to be able to take something ultra-pure, like a bell or electric piano (or… autotuned vocal?), and destabilize it without any tonal adjustment at all. Retain the chime but add that bit of drift. I hope you like Flutter.

download StarterKit.zip for just the basics
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.