kCyberCity

TL;DW: kCyberCity brings live atmosphere to deep reverb.

kCyberCity.zip (644k) standalone(AU, VST2)
kCyberCity in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

If you count the number of Airwindows reverbs, even just the ones with ‘k’ in front, it’s pretty daunting. This journey has taken years. Most recently, I’ve been working on the basic technology of how the reverbs are even made (running a 6×6 Householder matrix fed by a 3×3 early reflections matrix) and refining the program that I run, night after night, to explore the space of possible delay combinations using genetic algorithms.

And still, the best discoveries are the accidents.

kCyberCity sounded, from the first, like rainy neon dystopian futurism. Which is to say, it screamed ‘Blade Runner’, but it doesn’t actually have a Lexicon algorithm in it… it’s way more complex than that. It sounded like what I imagine Blade Runner sounded like. Specifically, I got a sense not of a big room, but of rainy city streets, washes of echo return, a particular sheen that felt like neon reflections on pavement sounds.

But what really helped (in more practical terms) was developing a ‘room tone’ method that involved not only feeding ‘VoiceOfTheStarship’ noise into only the regeneration part of the reverb, but also coming up with a way to modulate that, where before I’d tried things like ‘Discontinuity’ in that position. What I got was special: where I got a hot intense sound in a reverb like kGuitarHall2, this time I got the ability to disrupt the deep reverb field as if listening into a live environment, with wind and atmosphere. And two separate ways to manipulate that, for defining the apparent size of the reverb space and for defining how still (or un-still) the air was in there. Oh, and also a feedback nonlinearity that tweaks the whole character of the space.

This is the first truly live Airwindows reverb, but won’t be the last. Turns out that even if you drop the ‘room tone’ right down to what is realistic for an acoustic space, it still makes a huge difference in believability. A lot like dither, really, but considerably more obvious. You’ll have to use BitShiftGain (or compress really hard?) to get it to be obvious, but you don’t have to. The room tone is heightened when regen is turned way up, if that’s your intention. In normal use, think of it like a sort of dither, but for spaciousness.

There’s quite a few more along these lines, especially if you count the smaller spaces I keep getting asked for. Those should respond well to this new tech and convey a powerful sense of what they are. It’s just that starting with a spectacular sci-fi fantasy is too much fun to miss :)

Oh, also, you can adjust Position on the fly now, or automate it. Also also, the Pi5 build now specifically supports 64-bit Pi, so the Pi5 build of kCyberCity will run on 64-bit Pi, plus also every single other plugin in that collection (close to 500: ALL of them) also now runs on 64-bit Pi. The Pi4 build is still built on a 32-bit Pi 400 to support those humbler tinyboxes, which should also run this just fine :)

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.