Airwindows

Snares

Snares is a glorious trainwreck! It’s very difficult to make work.

The idea is, you get the top and bottom of the drum sound. The top you can replace with white noise, and the bottom you can replace with brown noise. Sound good so far?

Here’s the trouble. You can’t just overlay white noise onto a snare, at least not sample-by-sample. It’s too lean and sputtery, you have to trigger a separate envelope (like Noise). And you can’t make brown noise just by a random walk! You have to make it with more sophistication (again, like Noise) so you can actually hear it and it’s in useful ranges. Otherwise, you just have a big splurt of DC offset, and your channel distorts horribly. Making the bottom end of Snares useless and very hard to control.

If you want what this WANTED to be, back in 2007, you need Noise which came out in 2014.

If you want a horrible trainwreck… have fun! Maybe you can get a useful noise out of this. I’m guessing ‘nope’ ;)

Snares declares one sample of latency.

Date August 23, 2007
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Kicks

Kicks is… well. How do you get YOUR kicks? Probably not like this.

Kicks is…

while (nSampleFrames– > 0) { inputSample = *sourceP; sourceP += inNumChannels; tone += increment; if (tone > pie) tone -= pie; outputSample = (inputSample * (1.0-kicks)) + (inputSample * sin(tone) * kicks); *destP = outputSample; destP += inNumChannels; }

All this does, ALL it does, is overlay a tremolo onto the sound. Not even a fancy tremolo like the Airwindows tremolo, just a straight-up sine-shaped amplitude modulation at various bassy frequencies.

The idea was that you could break up a ringy kick by vibrating this other frequency across it. Of course, you risk stepping on the attack transient that way.

Whatever. At least you got to read the main event loop. :)

Kicks declares one sample of latency.

Date August 23, 2007
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

ResEQ

ResEQDemo is a universal binary AU plugin that gives you up to eight parallel resonant filters. It uses convolution modeling of an idealised analog-style peak impulse for extremely rich textures, and can do ‘parked wah’ effects of great sophistication.

The thing is, ResEQ builds a really complicated sort of ‘parked wah’ across a lot of frequencies, and doing that creates resonant (hence the name) tones that contain only those frequencies actively useful to you. It’s like going bonkers with a normal EQ or three and ripping everything that’s not useful. The result will sound very different from what you sent into the plug. You can use it on whatever, though it was designed around heavy guitar, particularly doubled or tripled heavy guitar where you might want additional thickness without screwing up other mix elements.

Note that effectively ResEQ gets rid of anything that will mask other instruments or get in the way in the mix—by centering on a whole bunch of different frequencies and discarding everything else, you can totally whack distortion-fizz no matter what the original tone sounds like. I’d suggest saving good settings as Logic presets, because it might take some time dialing them in, but with eight frequencies available you can have ‘secret guitar voicings’ as tricky to work out as a secret sauce. Try to find spaces in the frequency range to fill out the sound—some midrange, some up in the treble or supertreble, some down lower. The result will resemble a fullrange sound, but it will not mask other mix elements hardly at all.

ResEQ declares one sample of latency.

ResEQ is $50.

Date August 1, 2007
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Scalpel

Scalpel is an early attempt at a ‘surgical’ EQ meant to sound better than using a DAW’s internal DSP-cookbook EQ. It sort of almost works.

What it does is, give you three very narrow and intense beams of resonant filter, coded the same way ResEQ is coded. Instead of building a sound entirely out of these beams of resonance, Scalpel just gives you the mix and the three added filters. They have limited range and are happier in the mids and highs (but not the super-highs), and they’re not awesome at cutting, just at boosting.

They don’t sweep well by automation, either, because they recalculate their convolution kernel one bit at a time to avoid smashing 2007 CPUs too hard at once.

Lastly, I don’t see it as a mastering EQ, because it simply processes too much and does nothing to accomodate that necessity (newer plugins with a lot of processing, such as ToVinyl, take measures to retain tone and not just drown in a million calculations).

Have fun playing with Scalpel, and don’t cut yourself too bad ;) Scalpel declares one sample of latency.

Date July 21, 2007
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

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Snares

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ResEQ

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