Airwindows

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

kCathedral4

TL;DW: kCathedral4 is the Cathedral sound expressed as distant space.

kCathedral4 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
kCathedral4.zip (604k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Flagship reverb takes whatever the newest technology is, and expresses it in the flashiest possible way. kCathedral’s always been that for me, but the technology’s come a long way over the years. And it turns out even kBeyond was only a preview, and there’s major upgrades in store. kBeyond was using a literal million echo returns out of 3×3 and 6×6 matrices, but as the 3×3 only produces 27 echoes for early reflections I hadn’t bothered to implemented it as a full Householder matrix (involving multiplications for non-4×4 matrices, and some of the feedback being inverted, and the 3×3 doesn’t actually use local feedback even)

And then I tried it… the video shows the two files I made to see what would happen, and the one done like it is in kBeyond is sparkly and complex, and the one with the real Householder is a quantum leap in depth and realism.

And that’s what’s in kCathedral4, along with the Pear2 algorithm for filtering the deep-field reverb feed. It can do deep verb even unfiltered and bright, but when you mute it down to Bricasti degrees of darkness, you get a spaciousness that’s beyond anything I’ve had.

The algorithm is generated using the genetic algorithm: trying ‘populations’ of reverb constants and measuring how well they produce a result. I’ve learned things like how the total delay lengths of matrix paths added together are what need to add up to primes to sound right: it’s been really complicated, but worth it. I’m going to have some amazing small rooms and loud halls too, chambers, you name it. We’re just going back to the Cathedral, because it’s a really cool sound. You could put choirs or pipe organs or Tangerine Dream in it, but you can also put whatever you like in there. Doesn’t matter what you start with, you’ll end up with sound you can bathe in.

I’ll keep working: remember, each reverb plugin is designed around a dedicated algorithm tuned using the Genetic Algorithm to optimize for whatever its vibe requires, so the character of each one will be different in ways beyond just adjustment of the parameters. You do get parameters though: regen, filter for the deep field, loudness of the early reflection section. I’m working on extending this and look forward to doing more with it, but kCathedral4 is for you to enjoy right now :)

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 20, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Pressure6

TL;DW: Pressure6 refines the Pressure compressor and how it moves.

Pressure6 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Dynamics’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Pressure6.zip (698k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Until now, the most recent compressor I’ve made was BeziComp, which takes compression and applies Bezier curves to clean up the dynamics until there are no artifacts at all… which is not what you usually get with compressors and limiters! I put it out as a plugin, and I used it in ChimeyGuitar, where it modulates things with perfect smoothness… and yet. Turns out it just doesn’t seem to move right. Yes, perfect smoothness and freeness from artifact, but the way it moves seems odd.

Back to the drawing board! (though as always, the previous try remains available to all, because who knows when it’ll come in handy.)

Pressure6 is the result of refactoring the Pressure compression algorithm as it’s never been refactored before. It probably runs more efficiently on modern CPUs (which are happier doing math than they are keeping around extra variables). It also has an entirely new sound, from having isolated some of the strangest and trickiest qualities of the original Pressure. No longer is it as much of a mystery: in fact, I can probably do more variations on the theme. But this time around, my target was ‘2-buss Compressor’.

This isn’t the same as ‘limiter’ or ‘loudenator’. It’s more like ‘glue’ compressor. You can get it to squish things radically… if you drive it fully into dynamic inversion, as it’s still a variation on Vari-Mu. But the ability to control its internal attack and release speeds (which has always been a distinguishing factor for Pressure) meant I could control how it imposed movement into a mix, way better than I’d ever been able to before.

When used as a glue compressor, Pressure6 imparts dramatic movement to, and inside, a mix. Across all kinds of transient attacks, Pressure6 has a springy force that lets the music pounce forward eagerly, clarifying and heightening attacks. It highlights peak energy in a way compressors don’t often manage. Used on drums, it lets sustaining elements of the kit hang steady, hypes dense parts of the beat like the snare, and heightens the impact of the kick.

When you move towards lower ratios (this is a modified dry/wet) it blends in the dry signal but also starts to pad the output of the compressor, before it hits a soft saturation (like the original Pressure) to manage attack spikes. Doing this subtly raises the energy of those spikes even as you merge them with the dry signal using Ratio. The result is a compressor fit for 2-buss duties (for many, possibly not all, genres) which has a slightly touchy Compres control (as its behavior is dependent on you setting that just right) but an extremely forgiving and useful Ratio control, in which a broad range of settings sound good.

I think this’ll be useful and I hope you enjoy 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 July 13, 2025
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

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