The most amazing pop filter you maybe already had without knowing it!
This video isn’t really a ‘product’, though you can still support me finding stuff like this out through my Patreon.
Instructions for building an Airwindows SM57 mod can be found at the SM57 Mod page.
TL;DW: Super old school compressor for high definition transients. Adds no fatness, just energy.
Pyewacket is a strange beast. It’s inspired by how much I love the 60s/70s recordings out of London’s Olympic Studios, which had and used Pye compressors on many of my favorite classic and prog-rock records. Once you recognize the sound, nothing else will do: the musical event is delineated with hallucinatory intensity.
Mind you, for ten or twenty THOUSAND dollars it had damn well better hallucinate musical events on command: these are not compressors normal people can have, not anymore.
However, I’m ‘chris from airwindows’, so for me it’s not just a matter of mimicking the faceplate or even the specific behaviors of the device. I want something more original, that can get the essence of that electrifying sound. I might not play like a musical hero, but I want a compressor that can deliver that crackling voltage. And as I was listening to examples of a homebrew Pye replica, it suddenly hit me: I know how to make a compressor cut back just the body of the sound, leaving that energy and transient definition. I can also bring in the ‘brickwall filter’ behavior the Pyes have, as needed. And I have a whole life of devoted music listening off classic vinyl records to guide me. I can get the sound.
Introducing Pyewacket. Pyewacket is my compressor familiar. It may or may not have dark magic, but what it does have (demonstrated at the end of my video) is a response and tonality like no compressor you’ve heard. I can contrast it with Pressure4, and have done: where a more ’round and thick’ comp like Pressure4 brings stuff forward, Pyewacket’s soundstage sits back and the energy comes forward, from the highest treble to deep hard-kicking bass, producing a ‘retro’ sound where peak energy absolutely blows away the more thick, tubby RMS loudness. This is a compressor for a new era. We’ve been doing ‘loud and fat’ for decades now, and the loudness war is on its last legs, with automatic playback gain controls rendering it useless. You don’t have to be composing retro to use this. The only requirement is energy and information: whether as a 2-buss comp or to condition individual tracks, Pyewacket brings focus and intensity, and an incredibly clear and articulate attack transient where most compressors mangle and transform the attack beyond recognition.
And if you try really hard, yes you can kinda-sorta make it do that ‘Hole In My Shoe’ gratituous pumping thing. Rest assured, though: you probably shouldn’t.
Other people can’t do this plugin. You can’t market it in normal ways because it doesn’t do ‘BIG PHAT THICK PHWOAARRR’, you don’t switch it in and have all the music leap forward and become much bigger and in fact it might make things smaller, and an inexperienced kid with softsynths and Apple Loops might think something was amiss and be extremely uninspired. And anyone trying to tie it to the twenty thousand dollar unattainable hardware compressor would be compelled to model every little detail of the very complex and twitchy hardware unit, and that would cause that plugin to be overprocessed and it’d lose most of what made it special.
But Pyewacket is important, because it’s the sort of thing I can do when supported by Patreon. I don’t have to restrict myself to what’s going to sell to blind market forces. I can make it the essence of how Airwindows would do this sound, and I have done. As such, it is free in AU, Mac and PC VST form. If I’m poorer than you (go check on the Patreon and see, I get paid monthly) then it might be worth your while to chip in a buck a month (or more if you like).
I really, really, really like this one, and maybe you will too :)
TL;DW: Smoothest saturation or antisaturation, plus highpass.
This one started a lot! The algorithm used here has echoed through many other Airwindows plugins. It’s literally the smoothest saturation you can have in a plugin: the transfer function’s a sine. This is what’s in Channel, too: there are many ways to adapt such a simple mathematical function.
But there’s more! Because Density runs multiple stages, allowing it to bulk up the tone into an overblown, insanely fat and saturated distort-fest. And then you can highpass just the distorted stuff alone, and trim its output gain, and mix it with the unfiltered dry to produce lots of tonal possibilities. And then there’s the spatial positioning factor: saturating stuff this way brings it forward in the mix. You can also isolate midrangey elements and bring them forward using that trick.
And then there’s the negative values: if you UNsaturate, you get a thinned out lean tone and it drops back instead of pushing forward. And you can blend that too.
Density’s one of the better utility plugins. It’s there to reshape tones in myriad ways, mostly having to do with fatness or thinness, also having to do with upfrontness or recedingness. It can also give articulation to sounds that are murky, or simply produce the hugest fattest roaring wall of grunge you ever heard.
This sort of thing is supported by my Patreon, so if this or the many other plugins I’ve produced prove useful to you, please chip in. I’ve got a lot more work to do before my plugin library is ported, and even when that’s done, I’ll still be creating new plugins, with your support :)
TL;DW: Lowpass gives rich textures, Highpass timewarps your tone.
These are mixing EQs, not mastering ones (though I’m not the boss of you). They’re complementary: the one is the inverse of the other. However, because of their peculiarities that makes them behave quite differently. What they have in common is they’re interleaved IIR filters, something people don’t normally do. The experiment here has to do with my discovery that digital audio only exists in sets of samples (never just as the isolated sample: the waveform isn’t there, the sample value is only a signpost that the audio is to weave its way around)
They’ve also got a very unusual parameter, soft/hard or loose/tight, which controls how the IIR filters are fed audio. When you offset it, you get a situation where the cutoff is higher at louder volumes, or at quieter volumes. This is on a sample-by-sample basis so it’s a tone-character modification, subtle but interesting. Loose/tight is just the best way I could describe what’s happening there.
Lowpass gives you a treble rolloff (some have joked that I make dozens of treble rolloffs! Yes, but they all sound different) and what’s immediately obvious is, the stuff right up by Nyquist on the threshold of hearing is not rolled off with the rest of the treble. Also, if you only want to cut extreme treble, you can do it with just adjusting the soft/hard control away from the center position. At deeper cut settings, the soft/hard control gives you two different textures (both of which keep a hint of ‘air’ right up top). The dry/wet control allows you to blend your result. Lowpass gives you big sounds with various colorations and a sparkly gloss that comes from your underlying sound: it’s a big-ifying filter that might suit huge synth pads or orchestral tracks.
Highpass, the inverse of this, gives totally different impressions. The same filter-offset behavior turns into ‘loose/tight’ and the extreme treble gets stepped on, rather than retained. This makes Highpass take on ‘classic’ tonalities, particularly with the offset on ‘loose’, which gives a tubey and softened texture. If you run it full-wet, you’ll get a radical ‘analogification’, wiping out all extreme lows and the highest highs, and sounding like some small vintage radio at high filter settings. It’s a small-ifying filter that’s also a time warp (with offset on ‘tight’, you have a transistor radio instead, still retro-sounding!) and all you have to do is dial in your boost area and then balance it with dry/wet to get intense texture shaping that normal EQs can’t come close to delivering.
Again, these are not mastering EQs unless you face really unusual mastering requirements. They’re mixing tools, and they really do act like different animals so they’re each contained in their own plug. They’ve been around for ages but the revision to VST form has brought them a new level of tonal sophistication plus the very useful dry/wet controls that take them out of ‘experiment-land’ (they have always been building blocks for plugins such as Guitar Conditioner) and makes them stand alone as useful mix tools.
Lowpass for buttering up your textures and making them glossier and deeper, and Highpass for giving tracks that retro analog voicing… and Patreon because (not unlike the DAW Reaper) I’m giving you stuff very freely and trusting that it will earn me a place in people’s sound engineering worlds. I began Lowpass and Highpass in 2007, inventing the basic concepts (and still no other EQ does anything like it). In 2016, returning to them, I’ve made them even more useful. Imagine what I’ll do in 2026, or what I could do with a serious income from the Patreon. I think I can earn my keep :)
