kPlateA
TL;DW: kPlateA is a plate reverb, not unlike its namesake atop Abbey Road :)
So I just happened to turn my efforts to plate reverbs last week, since the internet exploded over some plugin drama and some of the plugins in question just happened to be models of some specific plate reverbs in a famous place: atop Abbey Road Studios. There were four of them, and I’m sure I can’t make a plugin to model those exact ones, as the rights to the name are probably all tied up. And I wouldn’t suggest that I tried to make reverb plugins MORE realistic than those made by this company with rights to the name. That would be rude! :D
But I bet nothing is stopping me from making plugins and using the LETTER. And indeed nothing is stopping me from finding examples of dry sound and then the sound of these other plugins, and using that as a reference to the lettered EMT plate reverb on top of Abbey Road, or indeed figuring out that this other company rather overprocessed its stuff and finding ways to get a similar effect that’s cleaner, deeper and more intense.
It’s actually a really interesting puzzle to do this sort of thing… especially when you don’t really have good reference yet, as it’s all happening so fast. But now you have kPlateA. And in it, you might just have a new best plate reverb. It’s using multiple fancy Householder feedforward matrices, all sorts of filtering, undersampling to make it useable at 96k and 192k, and seeing as it was developed on my antique Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard, I daresay it both sounds better and runs better than its competition.
Oh, one more thing: you get to own it. And by that I mean, not only do you get it maintained and supported for free (thanks to a thriving Patreon and those who help me), but it is also MIT-licensed open source code. So you get to own it, in the sense of you can take the code and skin it with a big GUI with pictures of plate reverbs with funny waves drawn on them, if you feel that is really necessary. You just have to credit Airwindows.
Or, you may find that the way this can sit in the mix, means the GUI with pictures of plate reverbs with funny waves drawn on them, isn’t really as necessary as you thought it was :)
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.
VCV Rack module
This is exciting! Thanks Chris for getting in this. I had stopped using the Waves Abbey Road Plates because of their ridiculous asio bandwidth consumption.
No, those big stupid rocker-fader things don’t make it sound better.
And the sound of them wasn’t as easy to blend into a mix as I expected – in fact I found it too lumpy, resonant and dark most of the time.
I replaced all instances of the Waves plates with simple impulses of EMT plates, which were alot better.
BTW, your Chamber is incredibly useful too. At first I wasn’t sure why the plugin was only ‘mono’.. then after a while I came to appreciate the dual mono thing, keeping things in place can be nice
On the other hand… you could possibly sometime do a ‘true stereo’ version whcih also maintains panning positions.
I look forward to getting some plate back in my mixes!
yes Patreon sub is well worth it :) I will try this elevated plugin of a plugin of a real thing this week on some rough vocal recordings
Thank you Chris for this excellent plugin.
siempre encuentro tus trabajos altamente recomendados y me encanta la calidad resultante siempre los descargo muchas gracias por todo ello.
This is a very nice sounding plate, and can’t wait to try it out. This video was very interesting in how you decided what actions you’ve done. Thanks much
Good