Drive is one of the early Airwindows saturation plugins. It’s edgier and gutsier than Density, which tends to sound really smooth. Like Density, it’s got a set of controls which let you do stuff beyond simple overdrive: split the signal into dry and wet, highpass the dry before distorting it for extra grind and energy, and then blend it back into the dry to wake up the tone.
Pressure is a special little plugin that helped Airwindows get launched. It’s a vari-mu compressor algorithm, meaning that it kicks in harder if the input is hotter.
The thing about Pressure is this: though I spent years making it more sophisticated, I’ve also spent years learning the power of very simple algorithms. Pressure’s a very simple plugin. You can’t even easily adjust it: there’s no specific distinction between attack and release, no way to adapt it to varying sample rates, none of the modern amenities and yet the tone of this little thing has won over some amazing golden ears. It’s unusually clean around 10K, despite having nothing in particular to fix aliasing problems. Sometimes it’s hard to improve a simple thing by making it more complicated…
If you’re looking for an Airwindows compressor, I strongly recommend checking out not just the successors to this plugin, but the original Pressure itself. It’s 64 bit/32 bit/PPC Audio Unit like everything else, so it should run on everything—and it’s probably the best Airwindows example of a ‘magic plugin’ which could not be improved on, just changed into different things in its evolution.
Slew is just the slew clipping section of what’s in Channel. It’s a very old, very simple form of processing, but bear in mind that sometimes this sort of DSP, which touches the audio very very lightly, has real strong points. You don’t always gain by making stuff more sophisticated. This is a freebie, so you can try it and see if you prefer the sound of DSP when it’s kept to the absolute minimum of processing. This is literally all Slew is, in this first incarnation:
inputSample = *sourceP;
sourceP += inNumChannels;
clamp = inputSample – lastSample;
outputSample = inputSample;
if (clamp > threshold)
outputSample = lastSample + threshold;
if (-clamp > threshold)
outputSample = lastSample – threshold;
lastSample = outputSample;
*destP = outputSample;
destP += inNumChannels;
Also, the secret word is ‘Applejinx’ (for those who have dug all the way to the very first post). :)
