Airwindows

Iron Oxide 5

TL;DW: The old school, heavily colored Airwindows tape emulation.

IronOxide5
(there is a build of the initial version available: IronOxideInitial5 is the first version, before I added the noise level control. I’m providing it in case people need it for special circumstances, but you should NOT have it and the full Iron Oxide 5 installed at the same time, because they share plugin identities and you’ll confuse your computer)

The legacy of this plugin goes way back. Many years ago, I was coding some of my first AU plugins, and some friends of mine were having bad experiences with a company that sold the big tape emulation plugin of the day. Outraged, I charged into the fray: I would code a replacement for them, one that did the same things and sounded better and sold for $60 (later $50). And that was Iron Oxide. It had one ‘ips’ control, a Drive, and an output level.

Then, I expanded on that with Iron Oxide 2. That one split the ‘ips’ top and bottom cutoffs, so you could vary the ‘bandpassy’ quality it had. It used the same unusual algorithm, but made it more flexible. It also incorporated an unusual sort of anti-aliasing in the form of a ‘tape noise’ factor that blurred slew.

Iron Oxide 3 added flutter. At this point, we stepped away from strictly zero latency: instead, the plugin declares zero latency but produces a fuzzy smear across one or two samples, the range the flutter covers. That persists with Iron Oxide 4 and 5, and is how the current free VST Iron Oxide works.

Iron Oxide 4 added something else that (come to find out) is also present in the Delta Labs Effectron: inv/dry/wet control. That persists with Iron Oxide 5. The way you use it is, set up an Iron Oxide tone that accentuates a frequency range (like mids). Drive it, or leave it clean… but begin setting the control to inv (the inverted position). You’ll subtract it from dry, causing a dip rather than a boost, but if you’re saturating the ‘tape’ then the dip will leave dynamic energy in the area being cancelled: it will cut out fat, leaving punch. Overdrive the ‘tape’ section harder (and turn down ‘inv’) to get more punch out, or leave it clean and use it just to cancel out the area. It’s an unusual effect, but it works.

Iron Oxide 5 is all of this, plus lessons from the ‘Purest’ line of plugins (mostly still in line to be released later) to produce the same thing as Iron Oxide 4, but even more pure and resonant and intense. None of these are really ‘mix buss’ plugins (though I’m not the boss of you): they’re far too intensely colored and distorted. They’re more about ‘make that snare really bark’ and so on. Though of course, since I’m not the boss of you, I can’t prevent you from trying to use it on the full mix. All I can do is say that ToTape is coming, and that’s the MODERN tape emulation. This is the old school, rowdy, obvious tape emulation, full of grunge and bark :)

And it is free, because it’s supported by Patreon. We’ve passed the threshold where I’m releasing the formerly-Kagi ‘greatest hits’ plugins, and as long as I stay over $600 a month, that continues. If I top $800 I begin open sourcing the plugins too, and if I top $1000 a month I’ll be releasing two of these greatest hits a month, in addition to other plugins and related plugins and YouTube videos showing you how to do things.

A splendid time is guaranteed for all, and I hope you enjoy Iron Oxide 5. Stay tuned for ‘TapeDust’, the ‘analog tape grain’ aspect of Iron Oxide isolated and put under your control so you can have it separate from the complete plugin (i.e. no overdrive or distortion), and I am open to also doing an ‘Iron Oxide Classic’ which goes right back to Version 1 and acts like the much simpler distorted bandpassy emulation where it all began. Ask and you shall receive :)

Date May 7, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 13 Comments

Swappable Mega Dark Hat

Here’s another Airwindows studio post that serves two purposes. One, I’m showing you an alternate mega-dark and loud hi-hat sound (like the acoustic version of a low-fi sampled dark hat) you can make with a $50 Wuhan cymbal and some tin-snips. But it was also an experiment to see if the Xiaomi Yi camera compresses its microphone. It does not! So this is what THAT sounds like, and also this serves as a YouTube reference. The drum parts are completely smashed to hell, and YouTube is getting the raw cam footage directly. So, this will show you what YouTube is currently doing with heavily distorted audio. If they pad this, then they’re in ‘normalization mode’ and will also turn down over-loud masters. If they leave it, then they’ll accept at least brief ultra-loud content. Refer back to this video if YouTube experiments with how they transcode stuff, to see if it changes!

This is supported by Patreon :)

Date May 5, 2017
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Air

TL:DW; A different bright EQ from any other.

Air

Digital EQ is a series of trade-offs. You can have a general effect with a simple calculation, or a more complicated effect with more calculation, or you can just bury the audio in calculation and get something very precise which unfortunately is just a huge pile of mathematics. And digital EQ shows this: it’s typically some digital-audio textbook calculations, maybe with distortion or a convolution impulse on top of it. When it does extreme things, like sharp or resonant filters, it bogs down in the details and loses texture, and it’s a rare developer (like Andy Simper with his nifty ‘The Drop’) who can do something interesting with ’em.

Enter Airwindows.

These are something different. They’re ‘air band’ boosts (less effective as cuts, or you can over-cut to create odd cancellation effects) based on an entirely different principle, basically interacting with the sample rate directly as if it was a ‘gearbox’. There’s a feedback parameter that serves to increase the resonance of the filter, making it ring and produce still another tonality.

The thing is, you don’t get to adjust them. I can’t give you 14K out of the 15K tap, and that number only relates to if you’re at 44.1K sampling rate: if you’re at 48K it’s actually boosting 16.3K. This is the technology that turned into ‘Energy’ (a forthcoming Kagi-class plugin on the ‘patreon release list’, and it can’t be adjusted: it’s a little black box and we’re only doing a dry/wet with each tap (the Filter Q affects all taps).

But what it CAN do is give you a ridiculously powerful boost at 10K, 15K or 22K, and let you sharpen it. It’s doing that with far less processing than you’d usually have to do, to get the result, and it’s doing it as a simple add so it retains the tone of the audio. And one more thing: if you do a super-sharp resonance, with normal EQ that’s linear phase you have to produce extensive pre-ring to get that filter curve. Air doesn’t do that. All its ring takes place after the initial transient attack, so Air is unusually good at sculpting the attacks of trebly sounds… for instance, EDM high percussion and hihats and sampled cymbals… and doesn’t blur where they attack, at all.

That makes Air a VERY good secret weapon for tightening up the percussiveness of hats and snares on EDM. Whatever genre you’re in, you can dial-an-attack and there will be no blurring from the EQ. Your options might be limited to a few bands, but on the other hand you can make crazy blends (they’re parallel) and get unique tonalities all with ultra-sharp attacks, even if you’re maxing out the Filter Q to make things sound very, very unnatural.

Sometimes that might be exactly what’s needed :)

Oh, but please don’t actually treat it like a secret weapon. Treat your SETTINGS like a secret weapon, and tell people if you’re finding Air useful. That’s because I survive through a Patreon that has replaced the previous form of Airwindows, and it’s done so well that now we’re starting to release the greatest hits of Airwindows! If all goes well, Iron Oxide 5 is coming out next week, and you can have the latest version of the second most popular plugin Airwindows ever made, with $27,844 in sales over its lifetime as a $50 plugin. And it will be FREE. And at the next funding goal, I begin the process of also making them open source. So please don’t treat Airwindows plugins as a secret weapon. Treat it as a Patreon, and the more the merrier: it lets me do more interesting things if I can afford to do them :)

Date April 30, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Loud

TL:DW; Distortion and demolition of air molecules, modeled.

Loud

Here’s something rather special. What if you could distort like air molecules distort?

I studied recordings of competitive tractor pulls, of Space Shuttle launches, various recordings that represented the way air can be mangled and break apart. The result is Loud… a step into a much louder world. It’s a distortion that can be slammed to unthinkable ‘heart of a supernova’ dB levels, but can also be subtly introduced to give the sonic coloration of a big LOUD noise in open air. Makes for a very interesting ‘glue’ at zero boost!

Here’s how it’s done: rather than apply a consistent transfer function like a normal distortion, Loud knows whether you’re compressing the air, or letting it rebound. And if it’s snapping back, it can do it with the speed of lightning, but if it’s compressing, the air can be squished to practically solid, increasing heat. This extreme nonlinearity is why Loud sounds the way it does. It can sit on a whole mix to give it scope and authority, or it can be pushed harder on individual tracks like guitars and drums to amp up the ferocity.

Remember, if you’ve got it totally fuzzing out, you are probably already beyond any sound level achievable by human means. The completely fried sound of cranked-up Loud is not meant to seem like acoustic phenomena as we know it. It turns up that loud because I grew up reading Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, and because in no other way can you accurately emulate a Disaster Area concert. :)

If you like me inventing things like this, support my Patreon. It’s over the funding goal of $600, meaning that I will start to release the Kagi for-pay plugins, one a month, starting with Iron Oxide 5 (the newest version, never seen before!). But there are other goals to reach, too: at $800 I will begin open sourcing these plugins under the MIT license, and at $1000 I will release two of the Kagi plugins a month—twice as fast! Sky’s basically the limit. And for today, as a token of good will, I bring you the loudest noise in the universe :)

Date April 23, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 8 Comments

Chris

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Loud

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