Airwindows

TapeHack

TL;DW: TapeHack is a new dimension in tape realism, abstracted to software.

TapeHack in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Tape’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
TapeHack.zip (491k) standalone(AU, VST2)

It started with a paper by Spencer Walters, on this subject: what’s the role of hysteresis in magnetic tape recording? We tend to assume that’s fine, we’re making it linear, apart from all the soft saturation of course. Even then, that’s not quite where it starts: it’s research on Dolby HX-Pro that got Spencer thinking. I’m not sure the Dolby people quite understood the implications of what they had, as that was an era of ‘remove all distortions’.

Gradually, Spencer started to figure out what he had, and Spencer wrote a paper, talking of magnetic flux and relative coercivity and hysteresis loops. I frankly don’t have the math he does, but I worked with analog tape growing up, and have a good idea of how it responds. And there was this set of diagrams, of a 1kHz wave magnetizing tape, and what you actually get out of it without and with tape bias…

It showed there was a dead spot, if you didn’t bias. Well, I knew that: I’d coded something like it into ToTape 7 and 8, letting you dial in a section of Type AB distortion if it was ‘underbiased’. But look again: that dead spot is still there, if you bias. The recording is sweeping back and forth across it at 100 kHz, but it doesn’t stop that dead spot, where magnetic tape’s coercivity hasn’t kicked in, from still existing. You’re just keeping it way busier than before, but a 100k wave still has to sweep through zero each cycle.

What if this dead spot was central to tape sound as we know it? What if there’s always a hint of it, a bit of antisaturation in there at the opposite dynamic extreme from TAEP PHAT, as shown in Spencer’s diagrams? More importantly, could I code something like that?

Sure could :)

TapeHack does a number of interesting things due to what I came up with. First, it’s very efficient: it’s a simpler, lower-CPU form of a sin() function, so it has the softclip nature. It’s made to have this ‘extra zone’ by manipulating how an approximation of sin() is made, so I can also do variations on it and asin() and combinations of them, for the purposes of future Console versions. Doing that tends to take away the saturation effects, so there would be additional layers of TapeHack for making ‘vintage consoles’ sound as we experienced them.

The differences in waveform can be described. Unlike sin(), TapeHack hits a soft saturation point and then takes the flat top and begins to extend it, while turning the ‘quiet part’ of the wave into more of a trapezoid shape that’s remarkably persistent in its slope. The steepening curve of the soft-clip gets sharper and sharper while these other factors stay relatively consistent.

As a result, TapeHack does ‘tape compression’ better than anything I’ve ever made, full stop. Turns out you can make sharp softclip corners, but we hear ‘brighter’ as a function of how much more steeply that center part of the waveform slopes. It’s heard as a shockingly believable ‘tape bark’ on things like drums, it’s heard plainly when you run a heavy guitar sound hot to ‘tape’ to make it sit more up-front, but just as importantly, it livens up a more quietly ‘recorded’ track by giving it that characteristic dynamism and optimal distribution of peak energy.

A side note: I’ve posted classic vinyl records and measured them, tracking peak vs. RMS energy, as that’s been my own parallel pursuit of what went on in those very sonic Seventies, when things just sounded better to me. A common factor is WAY more emphasis on peak energy and crest factor, with it persistently sitting much better dynamically than digital accuracy gives you. Well, this lines up with that observation exactly. Applying this hysteresis (or, like with TapeHack, just using the transfer function directly) produces both the peak distribution and the desired sound.

I’ll be using what I learned in TapeHack for many things. 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 August 17, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 8 Comments

TakeCare

TL;DW: TakeCare is a lush chorus ensemble universe.

TakeCare in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Effects’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
TakeCare.zip (575k) standalone(AU, VST2)

The idea was to revisit plugins like Melt, with an eye to even more disconcerting sonic spaces like the works of The Caretaker. Seemed reasonable to do. I started off with my Melt plugin, to see what would happen.

Then, in working on Householder matrices, I found that using a Householder matrix for a 3×3 grid of delays (rather than simply using them as delays, which I’d done before, thinking ‘what difference could there possibly be?’) made a HUGE difference. This is what’s creating early reflections in my plugins post kBeyond (which it turned out I immediately went beyond).

So, if you can do that with a 3×3 grid of delays that produces 27 echoes per channel… what if those delays were instead a chorus ensemble machine?

This is TakeCare. Most of the work I did on it, was using synth pads in order to make giant illbient soundscapes, and indeed it’s quite good at that. You can get real seasick off TakeCare. I’ve also set it up so the ‘buffer’ control can be manipulated to intentionally create horrible noises: at full regen, it’ll even feed back at small buffer settings, and it’s made to go into distortion a little below full scale in case you want to get real crunchy. It’s also using an old Console algorithm internally, to expand the space inside the blast of noise.

And then it turns out that if you keep it more calm, less regen, very small buffers and the depth not too extreme… it’s a gorgeous chorus ensemble on something as revealing as a vintage Fender Rhodes. It generates stereo width, supplies a lovely pad of lushness around the instrument, and doesn’t have to be weird at all. This could come in handy on things like synth pads, voices, who knows what? Think ‘lush stereo chorus ensemble’ and dial it in to whatever your needs are. The range on this is pretty nuts, because it was originally designed for radical uses but cleans up really well.

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 August 10, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 6 Comments

Silken

TL;DW: Silken is a high frequency boost that gives ambience and texture.

Silken in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Filter’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Silken.zip (543k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Here’s one where the plugin is probably better than my ability to demo it. Silken is a kind of high frequency boost, based on PrimeFIR used in ‘prime mode’ but backwards, so rather than being a lowpass with lots of ambient leakage, it’s a method of subtracting such a brickwall mostly linear phase lowpass with different leakage.

So that’s a lot. You can simply listen to it and see whether it is able to do ‘silky high frequency boosts such as you might use for lead vocals’ or you can bear with me as I try to explain HOW it does that thing. Because, even though stuff’s kinda hectic around here and my video wasn’t good, the plugin I made really brings a useful texture. If I could sing better I’d be all over this demonstrating how great it is, and even so it might help out. I feel it might click with people so it behooves me to explain how it’s real.

So, you can run a brickwall filter, using a ‘window’ (one of the controls) to determine just how steep the filter’s gonna be. It’s an algorithm called a sinc filter, and the wider the window, the steeper your brickwall can be. It’s a phase-linear filter, so it has pre-echo and it has latency. Silken does not compensate for this latency, which depends on how wide the window is: it’s a slightly unusual arrangement because it’s not completely symmetrical in an effort to cut down on the latency.

So far so good. It’s like a shelf for boosting highs and cutting lows. But then, bring in what PrimeFIR does. That lets you make the filter only from prime numbered samples, and not every sample. What happens when you make a sparse filter like that? I’ve made multiple plugins that use this TYPE of effect: BrightAmbience, and in fact my classic plugin Iron Oxide. There’s plenty of experience in using this type of effect… at least with me :)

PrimeFIR can make a ‘lowpass’ out of only prime-numbered samples (part of the filter, not just counting every sample in your audio) and it lets through a sort of ‘haze’ around the filtered sound, as audio across the whole window bleeds through. What Silken does is different in two ways. First, it’s subtracting the filtered part, to make it a highpass. Second, it’s constructing the filter out of only NON-prime samples, this time. So what’s happening is, it’s more effective at being a highpass than PrimeFIR is at being a lowpass, but the stuff that leaks through is still out of the prime numbers because those are now the ones NOT being subtracted.

You get a highpass where, the harder you push it, the more of an ‘aura of silky ambience’ you get around the highs. It will sort of diffuse super high frequency transient information, like a diffusion filter does for visual information. The result is flattering in exactly the same way a camera’s diffusion filter is. It should work fine on even the most high quality sources, but it should be an absolute lifesaver on the kind of nasty mic (like certain lavaliers!) that puts out distressing hyperfocussed bright transients. Now, you can diffuse that and change the texture of it, not just turn the brightness you’ve got up and down.

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 August 3, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

PointyDeluxe

TL;DW: PointyDeluxe devours all mix space.

PointyDeluxe in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Amp Sims’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
PointyDeluxe.zip (514k) standalone(AU, VST2)

So this is one of the strangest things I’ve ever made. This is not normal.

What happens with PointyGuitar is, successive stages of EQ and saturation zero in on the tone of a guitar sound, which is also gated and run through a separate filterbank that’s just a very steep and intensely colorful cutoff. You get intense tone shaping and the type of sonic confinement a speaker cab would give, at least to some extent: and though the colorfulness twists the phase like a physical speaker might, there are no resonances or colorations so there’s a sonority there.

So what happens when you remove the gate and also the extra filterbank and use all the controls solely for fine-grained control over the core amp engine?

Terrifying, bad things :)

The thing is, PointyGuitar has the same number of bands PointyDeluxe has. Internally, it uses double the filter bands that you see in the controls. What it’s doing is splitting the difference, smoothing the curve by applying intermediate settings.

With PointyDeluxe, you get to make a radical departure from this, and boost or cut much narrower bands… but it’s using the AngleEQ code, which is not as stable as you’d think. So, in the same way that PointyGuitar can get frisky when you twist the knobs too much, PointyDeluxe can be unstable… more. In particular, if you boost a band and try to cut the band just below it, things get real messy. If you boost any band, that’s where added gain comes from: it’ll track whatever is the loudest band and set the gain from that. If you cut, there’s a built-in pad which attenuates the whole output based on which band is the least. Any band set to zero will silence the plugin. If you set bands to almost nearly zero… it will probably not stop PointyDeluxe from exploding with strange howling noise.

Such are the fates of deeply abnormal plugins… at least Airwindows ones. This is one of the best plugins I’ve ever made for resembling a strange circuit board found in a drawer, which delivers wild pungent noises before it burns out. However, PointyDeluxe, being software, needn’t burn out.

When you try to use it for good, what happens? The bands are named after Slipperman’s Distorted Guitars From Hell, which seems appropriate. You can take a suitable band like ‘Pick’ and crank it up until it chugs. You can cut back the top two bands, Fizz and Hell (as in ‘road to hell, lose a windshield up here’) until the chug isn’t that grating. You’ll have to dial back the lows as the boost affects them too, and you’ll have to make two slopes, one dialing it back until you reach another boost at H Meat or L Meat, and then below that you’ll have to dial it back more, though you can’t go too steep. All the ‘sweet spots’ for every band will be very fussy. But because of the topology of PointyDeluxe, you can do it. It’ll be trying to blow up every second… some settings will sound like the amp is literally melting… but it can be done, you can replicate the tonal signature of a huge high-gain amp in PointyDeluxe.

And it sounds totally insane. What is it? It’s distilled essence of heavy guitar without any blur or coloration. It’s the searing intensity of a heavy amp (because of up to fifteen stages of EQ and overdrive) but this applies only to the chug, and because of how high gain distortion works, the full range sound is also constantly present around the edges. Functionally, that means the guitar sound gets shaped into chug or other sorts of intensity, but it also takes up ALL the space. There’s no gloss to the highs, no rumble to the lows, it’s stripped and bare in the weirdest way and three guitars of high gain PointyDeluxe might as well be a hundred.

My hope was to make the densest, most brutal heavy guitar tone ever. Didn’t occur to me to ask ‘is there such a thing as too brutal?’ until I’d fired it up, using a new budget extended range guitar I got just for the purpose, and heard what I’d made.

There is probably such a thing as too brutal, and this is probably it. If you have a place for that, have fun!

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 July 27, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

Chris

TapeHack

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PointyDeluxe

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