Gate is a simple little utility plugin from early Airwindows. It’s the first Airwindows gate to use a technique from Density, where the gate transitions to silence through a ‘negative saturation’ stage. This causes sounds hit by the gate to sound like they’re pulling back spatially as well as going silent, something that is still unique to Airwindows to this day.
GlitchShifter is an experiment that went horribly right.
The idea behind this one was to produce a pitch shifter which would scan for crossover points, so that it could just splice bits of audio without crossfading or anything of the sort.
Unfortunately or fortunately, the attempt created a monster.
Glitch Shifter can be ‘controlled’ by the top two sliders, the first one for altering sound diatonically and the second, free-form. Those set the pitch (up only: didn’t work out the opposite, but pitch lowering is easier with normal tools).
Then, there’s Tightness, Feedback and Dry/Wet. Tightness is the one that needs explaining, though Feedback and Dry/Wet are important for making craziness. Tightness works like this: crank it out, and Glitch Shifter is FORCED to track exactly with the input signal. That’ll cause it to glitch out horribly, because it’s got no freedom to wander searching for an edit point.
As you lower Tightness, Glitch Shifter casts a wider net in its search for splices. The splices get smoother and smoother… but the little chunks of audio get bigger and more out of sync. You’ll begin getting stutter effects, unpredictable jumps which can break up words and coherence on the input. Low Tightness on Glitch Shifter means a fluid but nonsensical output, possibly with wild robotic stammering, but all in lovely clear pitch-shifted audio.
Some types of audio can give you an almost convincing pitch shift with a lot of tonal clarity. Others give a crazy mess of choppy madness. Or you can mis-set it for buffer-override types of pitched stuttering and random chipmunk echo, or the other way for harsh grinding robotic effects. You might even get it to act like a pitch shifter!
One of the greats, if you like sonic digital craziness.
Compressor is a weird little beast! If you’re looking for a great sounding, well-behaved, sane compressor, go buy the most recent Logical. This is not that.
What it IS, is Airwindows strangeness in an exceedingly pure form.
You get compression, attack speed, release speed, color, makeup gain, and dry/wet.
Compression includes some makeup gain adjusting. Don’t crank it out unless you want a rude shock, this plugin can put out VERY loud outputs.
Attack speed is faster as the control’s turned up. At slower attack speeds, the plugin’s actually putting a delay on the sensor, like anti-lookahead, to produce bigger transient spikes. This is in effect very early, so one interesting side effect is that the compression artifacts totally stop connecting to the waveforms, especially at very slow values. That’s uncommon for software compressors.
Release speed’s also faster as the control’s turned up. If you crank both, it’s very sputtery while still being unmanageably spikey. Slowing down attack speed gives you big fat chunky attack transients that are instantly suppressed.
Color is like a distortion that can get obnoxious on some sounds. It’s pretty much JUST an overdrive put on the front of the compressor before anything gets compressed. It’ll distort things before the comp gets ’em, if you want to stop the comp from getting knocked back too hard.
Makeup Gain is probably going to have to be set very low. This thing really jumps around when hit with program material. It’s more a suggestion than a straight-up output level control. Dry/Wet is what you’d expect, thankfully.
The biggest strength of this thing is squishing stuff like drums in such a way that the transient spike pokes out unreasonably, and making odd washy floating textures. It’s VERY HARD to control. It does manage a certain ‘fluid’ tone exceptionally well: up to you if you think that’s worth the effort. It’s free, have fun wrestling with the wild plugin.
BassDrive is truly a secret weapon, in that it’s a pet plugin for the notorious Slipperman! I kept it under wraps for years but now the secret identity of Slippy is known, and so too the secret of the plugin can be. I will tell all. And to be fair, this one isn’t becoming a freebie. I’m going to tie it to Golem, another Slippernian plugin, and with a bit of luck he will approve of me not starving and all, and appreciate me not outright throwing it in the freebie bin.
Remember, you have to know how to use these things. Here’s why BassDrive found favor.
All it is, literally, is an early four-band EQ implemented Airwindows fashion. It’s not even all Airwindows EQ code, it’s the only example of ‘cookbook’ EQ curves Airwindows has. Technically, they’re implemented like little convolution kernels, and they are also interleaved (which isn’t normal).
But more than that, they are implemented in such a way that every EQ band gets a saturation curve. The harder you ‘push’ the bands, the more they come forward in the mix. This is vital to voicing up-front sounds, it means you can spatially contour a sound rather than just fiddle with frequency components.
The bands are super-aggressive, though the highs are crazier than the lows. Then, there’s the drive control on the end, which is just another saturation stage.
Be aware of one thing: CStrip (and its precursor EQ) do the same thing as this. They do it less extremely and less aggressively, but they’re doing the same thing. BassDrive is just the one that can throw on sick boosts, the one that voices the bands differently and more rigidly than CStrip does, and with an extra gain stage to gel everything together.
If that works for you, you can have BassDrive. To get it, buy a copy of Golem (yes, a basic sort of utility for $50 but now you know it comes with a secret plugin) and ask for BassDrive in email. I’ll send it.
