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.
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.
Shelves is another strange little Airwindows EQ. This one’s a simple two-band shelf… that’s all Airwindows-ized in subtle ways.
The crossover’s altered in the way that Highpass and Lowpass are. As near as I can work out, what’s happening is that if you boost Treble, it gets harder. If you cut it, it gets softer. If you boost Bass, it seems to get softer. If you cut it, it gets harder. Seems to work…
Also, it’s using Density techniques rather than straight gain altering, so if you boost something it gets subtly more saturated and comes forward, and if you cut it it drops back. The whole thing is coded neatly and cleanly, so it works alongside recenter plugins without sounding inadequate. Its only weakness is really just that it’s a two-band shelving EQ without fancy tricks, best used for very subtle tone shaping.
Its strength is that it’s quite awesome at this very simple tone shaping, if you know all that its doing under the surface. If you just need to tilt things a bit or doctor the overall balance of things, without doing anything obvious, Shelves is awesome.
FathomFive was part of the evolution that led to DubSub, through BassKit and all manner of related plugins. A great deal of this development had to do with taming the low frequency boost: it’s an algorithm that also does work as the head bump for ToTape, and it’s very difficult to manage.
Specifically, it delights in pumping out silly amounts of totally subsonic bass, which does nobody any good. It’s also prone to fling DC content around.
FathomFive is an incredibly simple execution of this LF boost, with a main and sub octave, a frequency voicing control, and a dry/wet. It actually sounds quite good if you don’t mind lots of energy being thrown around under ten hertz.
If you’d like a copy of FathomFive, buy a copy of DubSub and ask for FathomFive by email. I’ll send it.
