Airwindows

SoftGate

SoftGateDemo is an AU universal binary plugin, to help with sampling and sample instrument creation!

The purpose of this one is more like mastering noise reduction or de-essing. As the gate closes, it also rolls off highs- instead of going for outright gated effects, it’s designed to not really close completely, just to soften and suppress hiss and background noise. This is for the purpose of working with instrument samples that must decay to silence, or reverb impulses that do likewise.

Bright Threshold and Darken Speed should be pretty obvious, and Base Silence is the control that’s like a de-esser: it’s the depth to which the plugin can gate. In noise reduction often it’s better to just step on hiss and noise rather than trying to wipe it to digital black, and this plugin is all about letting you transition from a fully bright, unaltered sample to an attenuated and highs-softened one seamlessly.

Sample instruments you make will have a warmer, less fatiguing sound due to the softer background hiss, and reverb impulses will decay into the distance better- you can dial in your preferred decay, and there’s a SoftGateLinked plugin included so you can work with stereo files, as well as mono files, properly!

SoftGate is $50.

Date September 18, 2011
Author Chris
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SubsOnly

SubsOnly is a utility plugin to use with Voxengo SPAN, in Density Mode. That will give you the best ‘VU style’, sense-the-loudness-of-the-track, metering, and when you put one of these utilities in front of SPAN, it’s calibrated so equal levels will give you appropriate amounts of extreme subs. If the levels are out of whack, your balances are also out of whack. (Not all mixes will produce the subsonic frequencies SubsOnly tests for, so it’s okay if they’re not present, but they should not be blowing away the outputs)

SubsOnly is a very simple algorithm: it’s just twenty-six IIR lowpasses in series. This produces an outrageous but very primitive lowpass, so you can also use it as an audio filter. It should sound a lot like listening to your mix from an adjacent house, or something, and you can use it to see what instruments are taking up subsonic space and get a sense of how the beat comes across at a distance.

This algorithm is available in Ditherbox, for convenience. That way you can switch it in for mix checking, without having to load extra plugins.

Date August 28, 2011
Author Chris
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SlewOnly

SlewOnly is a utility plugin to use with Voxengo SPAN, in Density Mode. That will give you the best ‘VU style’, sense-the-loudness-of-the-track, metering, and when you put one of these utilities in front of SPAN, it’s calibrated so equal levels will give you appropriate amounts of extreme highs. If the levels are out of whack, your balances are also out of whack. (it’s fine to have quieter output with SlewOnly: peak levels should not be hotter than the regular mix, though.)

SlewOnly is a very simple algorithm: apart from some volume boosting to calibrate it, all that happens is that each sample has the previous sample subtracted. This produces an outrageous but very primitive highpass, so you can also use it as an audio filter.

This algorithm is available in Ditherbox, for convenience. That way you can switch it in for mix checking, without having to load extra plugins.

Date August 24, 2011
Author Chris
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ElectricBass

ElectricBass is a cheap P-bass copy, played with fingers, most notes on the fretboard sampled, sustained long enough to play longish notes. There’s no velocity multi-sampling and it’s only eight megs or so in size. The point was to make a downloadable EXS24 sampler instrument so people buying my drum sample instruments could try something out and make sure they knew how to install such a thing.

It’s a very, very limited sampler instrument, but it’s free and can sound nice within its limitations. It’s got good note attacks, because I’m a bass player. Enjoy :)

Date August 19, 2011
Author Chris
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