Airwindows

Chris

Hi! I've got a new plugin you can have! These plugins come in Mac AU, and Mac, Windows and Linux VST. They are state of the art sound, have no DRM, and have totally minimal generic interface so you focus on your sounds.

May 4, 2025BeziComp

April 27, 2025SoftClock

April 20, 2025PointyGuitar

April 13, 2025SmoothEQ

April 6, 2025AngleEQ

FlatBass

FlatBass was part of my early experiments with drum samples. It’s not a drum instrument, it’s a sort of bass, obviously.

The idea was, I sold the drum sampler instruments outright, but you’d download the free FlatBass and get it to work in your DAW. If you could make that work, then you would probably be fine buying the drum sampler instrument as that was installed in the same way. That was the idea, anyhow!

FlatBass is a funny instrument, because it’s designed to be tiny. It’s very nearly a soundfont, looping its samples really obviously. I guess you can get a sort of organ-bass thing out of it? Anyhow, FlatBass is old and odd and free, and if anyone enjoys it that’s all I would ask. Electric Bass is somewhat better, instrument-wise, and also free.

Date March 8, 2008
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

DeHiss

DeHiss has just one control, Threshold. Sounds below this threshold will be de-hissed.

It’s not like a simple EQ: the algorithm’s doing freaky things relating to the mean level of samples, but for all practical purposes it acts like a gate that can clamp down brutally on high-frequency noise. The plugin was designed to cope with a tacky little prosumer USB mic pre that I won’t mention here, except to say it is the MXL Mic Mate and its claims of having a “Fully balanced, low-noise analog front end” are BAAAHAHAHAHA… erm, possibly somewhat exaggerated. But for $40 I suppose it’s all right (you can pay that much for a really high quality JACK…)

DeHiss maybe isn’t very sophisticated, but it sure as heck clamps down on noise. Most of what it’s doing codewise is dragging musical tone out of a pit of raw hiss. It’s a pretty good sounding lowpass in some ways and could be used as one if you just crank the threshold to full. I’ve tried it on basses and guitars, and it can produce pops and ticks from the threshold engaging/disengaging but it can also work pretty well as a gate, or as purely a lowpass. Since the method of clamping noise is so unusual, it produces a distinctive tone when used in place of a traditional lowpass, with a bit more muscle to it.

DeHiss declares one sample of latency.

Date January 28, 2008
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Silhouette

Silhouette is a specialized plugin that takes a track and replaces it entirely with noise shaped to the exact dynamic profile of the track- use it to tell if you have a beat or just an over-compressed mess. It’s not exactly a pure gate with regular noise underneath: it’s calibrated to give a sense of what the dynamics really are, so it exaggerates those dynamics somewhat. This effect is built into Ditherbox as a mix check, but the standalone plugin version is free.

Date December 12, 2007
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Chrome Oxide

Chrome Oxide was an alternate technique to go for ‘tape grunge’, originally sold as a separate plugin. It worked like this: it threw in a random noise, but instead of just overlaying the noise onto the sound, it used the noise to interpolate between the current and previous sample.

What that did was noise up the treble of the sound, and the steeper parts of waveforms, leaving the silence and flat areas of waveforms alone. It very quickly affected highs, and turned everything to a roaring grungy mess. Small traces of this effect are still used in Iron Oxide, though it’s not being sold standalone anymore.

If you’d like the original Chrome Oxide, buy Iron Oxide and ask me for Chrome in email. I’ll send it.

Date November 20, 2007
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Chris

FlatBass

DeHiss

Silhouette

Chrome Oxide

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club