Airwindows

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

PrimeFIR

TL;DW: PrimeFIR is a mostly linear-phase brickwall with a taste for the bizarre!

PrimeFIR in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Filter’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
PrimeFIR.zip (551k) standalone(AU, VST2)

It’s experiment time again! Inspired by the original filter in Baconpaul’s Six Sines FM synth (which I recommend the heck out of, by the way) I got busy trying to make a similar type of filter. This is not how I usually filter. I have a great distaste for the smearyness of linear phase and the weird vibe the pre-ring gives off, but it was amazing in Six Sines, partly because of the incredibly tiny and CPU-efficient window, and so I had a whack at the problem.

As usual I had a whack at it in pinata fashion, so rather than do it properly I came up with a way to implement the sinc function I needed for the brickwall, with a sin() based window, and for good measure I made the post-ring longer than the pre-ring just because I could, and made the window size variable so you could filter right down to moderately low frequencies, and that’s the first part of the experiment.

And then I thought it would be fun to calculate out the sinc function for what it would need to be if you took, not every sample, but every PRIME sample in that window, and used that. Only some of the samples, but across a much MUCH broader time window for the same number of filter positions. And also those positions wouldn’t be reinforcing each other, because they’re prime numbers. How hard could it be?

So, when you turn the ‘prime’ control over 0.5, you get a completely different filter, if that’s still an appropriate name for it. In theory it’ll filter down lower, except it completely fails to be a brickwall. It’s sort of like a shelf? And sort of phasey, and sort of diffuse, and it’s yours to play with. You’re hearing only a window of the prime-numbered samples peeking through and acting like it’s a filter or something resembling one.

And you’ve heard something like it before… because nearly twenty (!) years ago, my plugin Iron Oxide came out, and one of the things it does is build tone shaping out of prime-spaced successions of samples. No kidding: this technique hasn’t really been played with since Iron Oxide and variations on BrightAmbience. Here it’s a way to broaden the range of frequencies a brickwall filter can ‘reach’, except that since it’s such a sparse set of filter coefficients, it stops working like any normal brickwall filter and turns into something else.

If I wanted to make it be a similarly inefficient highpass, merely including an ‘Inv/Wet’ control wouldn’t be enough, I’d need to doctor the filter so instead it was accepting the nonprimes and omitting the primes, run the brickwall, and then subtract that.

This (not the prime version) is also what I’ve been trying for the last two reverbs, and some folks love that but others cried foul. I’m going to broaden my filter palette a bit for the reverbs, though now I know what this one can do (a sort of slick flashy effect) and will most likely turn to the Pear filter with nonlinearity for the next few reverbs. I’ve got about four different methods not counting simple biquads that will do different things. Even one (BezEQ!) that will produce gnarly artifacts for texture, for certain kinds of special effects.

For now, enjoy playing with the experimental PrimeFIR. It might just lead to an interesting sort of highpass for livening up things as significant as lead vocals… more on that later. 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 6, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

Chris

PointyDeluxe

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Pressure6

PrimeFIR

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