Airwindows

CloudCoat

TL;DW: CloudCoat is an array of blur effects with a taste for evil.

Welcome back to the dark side of Airwindows!

CloudCoat starts as an experiment. What if there was ClearCoat (a bank of small reverbs) except all the delays were allpasses?

Okay, so a bit of explanation: allpasses are like reverb parts, but they make stuff sound smeary and blurred, like bloom reverbs. I’ve got a bloom reverb, MV, which is just a stack of allpasses. Most of my recent work is about avoiding allpasses completely by using reverb matrixes that give me LOTS of echo returns, impossible numbers, so I don’t have to cheat with allpasses. This kind of works and kind of doesn’t (work in progress, see my recent livestreams). But what would happen if you took what was clearly a reverb, and just replaced all the delays with allpasses?

That’s ClearCoat and CloudCoat. The idea was I could give a completely different texture, but using literally all the same reverb constants, and then I could hear what it was like. I expected it to be more a cloudy, diffuse texture, hence ‘cloudcoat’.

You might notice one difference right away: ClearCoat sounds a lot roomier. That’s because it’s designed with a little bit of feedback to fill it out. Sustain, if you will. It’s also way more spacious, and way more metallic and ringy. This is in line with how it only uses delays, and is all part of the research.

CloudCoat with sustain all the way off, is quite different. Depth and spaciousness is almost gone, but there’s no metallicness either. It’s like essence of fake artificial reverb blur. Remember, this too is a 4×4 Householder matrix: it’s a complicated pile of allpasses, not something primitive like MV. I think it might find uses on pads or ambient sounds, or could be used to feed into ClearCoat at the same ‘select’ setting to create a more powerful room sound. With sustain all the way off, you can do many polite and nice things with CloudCoat.

Then, throw it on some drums and turn the sustain up and ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE :)

CloudCoat is applying a kind of nonlinear reverb, like your classic ‘nonlin’ gated verb settings, but Airwindowsized. I’m allowing feedback, but of the four ‘channels’ of Householder feedback, each is also modulated by the output of the one next to it (a totally different sound)… WITHOUT smoothing. So the feedback is broken up by four banks of allpass output and cranked up to the point of meltdown, and that’s CloudCoat. It disrupts the signal wildly and fiercely.

Why?

Because I tried it, on a livestream, and the drums absolutely exploded like nothing I’ve ever heard. There’s rasp and rattle and an effect much like extreme compression while in a stone drum room, but there’s no compression and no stone room. It just makes that sound. Instead of making it out of compressed, flat-topped compression smash, it’s making the madness happen INSIDE the sound, meaning you can make it brutal and unbearable with ClearCoat and THEN loudenate it, unlike any other sort of compression or distortion. CloudCoat adds a whole new type of trash that is dynamic with your sound (again, nonlin) and automatically dials itself back if the source energy level does. It’s a huge, nasty, energy-laden meltdown that can be escalated to pretty much any degree… and then dialed back down again, to pretty much any level of controllability, so long as you’re using it on noisy percussion and as long as you’re okay with its signature trash-sound, which is not like anything else and which is independent of added compression and distortion.

And then you can do blur/texture effects with the sustain on 0. Just don’t bother trying to make it work with tiny amounts of sustain: it basically can’t. 0 or trash are your only options, and then there is a universe of trash and meltdown if trash you choose.

But seriously, why?

Because it makes me laugh with delight when snares go off like something out of the imagination of Trent Reznor. I don’t know what to tell you. Enjoy CloudCoat, if it’s the kind of thing you enjoy.

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.
VCV Rack module

Date February 4, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

MSFlipTimer

TL;DW: MSFlipTimer is a utility that swaps stereo with mono every few (1-10) minutes.

MSFlipTimer.zip(481k)

Here’s a request I got, a variation on one that’s in the utility category. While I ramp up to more interesting stuff I can do some of the background work while putting out the thing that someone asked me to make :)

Every few minutes (as in, one minute to ten minutes) MSFlipTimer switches from stereo to mono. It does this in about a tenth of a second, to prevent any sort of pop or anything. When it’s in stereo it is 100% direct pass-through of the audio data word, so this is as clean as stuff like LeftToMono: it’s one of those ones that just copies the data over, not even touching it. That said, this doesn’t belong in your mix: the idea is that if you’re mixing and you tend to screw up the mono mix by doing too much crazy stuff with stereo, this’ll repeatedly force you to grapple with it in its mono form.

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.
VCV Rack module

Date January 28, 2024
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

SampleUndelay (for Mac AU)

TL;DW: SampleUndelay is AU-only SampleDelay featuring negative delay.

SampleUndelay.zip(214k)

By request, here’s something from the retro bin, brought up to date as well as I could :)

The original SampleDelay offered millisecond, sample and subsample delays, but it also offered negative delay. The thing is, it did that through declaring a bunch of latency and then delaying to match it. There’s a couple problems with that. Firstly, it kills your ability to track into the mixing system: everything gets the maximum added latency, and then more delay to get to whatever the target delay time is. So you’re always getting thousands of samples delay no matter what: it’s only OK for mixing. Even recording automation, that will interfere with you being able to interact with the mix.

Secondly, I’ve had trouble making it work reliably with different programs. Generally at 44.1k it does what it means to do. I’ve seen 96k recordings mysteriously try to use 88.1k for a latency, throwing off the calibration of the ms control. Never mind trying to do a VST port: I’ve not seen documentation on how that’s meant to be done though I understand the JUCE folks try to make it work, yet even they seem to sometimes run into incompatibilities. I’m running into incompatibilities even just on Audio Unit. For the time being I am not liking the results of trying to declare latency, even just on AU where it’s part of the basic plugin format.

But I was asked to bring this back anyhow… so here it is, as-is. It’s January and I’m mostly trying to get other stuff up to speed, such as the reverbs: in my video I asked whether people are interested in a ‘redux’ of kCathedral, because I’m interested in revising it to address criticisms (I’d keep the original one available, but replace it with a newer version) and to take advantage of a lot of woodshedding I’ve been doing on the subject of reverbs.

I’ve got a lot of things coming out in February, I just wanted to drop a thing or two that are not as big as full plugin releases, or things like this where there’s a couple people who want it, and limited scope for it. For VST users (of which I’m one, on Mac Reaper, because it runs a 64-bit buss) or indeed anybody, I’d also recommend just sliding the track earlier in the DAW, and then if you want a plugin, finetune it with the regular SampleDelay which will do exactly the same thing in the end, except you can track into it because you’re running a zero latency system (outside of whatever your DAW and converters impose).

For those of you that asked for exactly this, hope it will do :)

download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.

Date January 21, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

PaperChordReference

No plugin this week as I’m working on stuff in the pipeline (and using January to get other stuff done) but I’ve improved something I use for music :)

PaperChordReference(147k)

Here’s a further refinement of something I use in music making! It’s my Circle Of Fifths chart (that shows you what chords go with what keys). Except now it fits on an 8.5×11 piece of paper… and can be rolled up to make a little tube of music theory you can have!

It works like this: let’s say you want a major key like C. The first column says Am (the relative minor), the second Bm (avoid starting from here, it’s Locrian mode) and the third column is where you find your major key! All the chords across the chart will work in that key, and there’s a little piano keyboard reference showing you what black keys (if any) are in play.

Minor keys are in a slightly darker gray, and major keys (with major thirds) are in a slightly lighter gray. There’s a hard to read white lettering across the grays, but that’s just the name of the mode (simplified to minor, locrian, major, dorian, phrygian, lydian and mixolydian: the main ones are going to be major and minor, and another popular major and minor mode are lydian and dorian)

This time it’s stripped right down to the basics. No suggestion that you should cut out an elaborate slide rule, or fine print, and the key you’re in reads directly across and ends with a depiction of what keys those are (the notes are what the chords are if you ignore the m that indicates you’re to play a minor chord). Also, if you do roll it into a tube and tape it, and put the key you’re in facing forward, related keys are the most visible. You’ll raise tension by moving to a key that’s higher up, or drop back by moving to a key that’s lower than the one you’re in. For the classic big key change moment, jump up two like going from C major to D major! It’s almost the most related key you can have, but it’s still a big jump. Or if you’re Coltrane, spin the tube wildly and jump to keys about a third of the way around, each couple bars :) in this context, that would be jumping to a key you can’t see because it’s around the back of the tube, for every key change.

Lastly, one final note: I made all the chords that I consider easy to play on the guitar down around the nut (like folk chords or full strums), boldface. So there are a few like E flat or D flat minor, which are of course still playable but less easy to reach, and they’re in normal font: lighter.

This is way easier than making a slide rule or whatever, and now it includes a little keyboard symbol just to make it super obvious where the notes are. Hope this helps to bring new musical ideas!

There are two earlier versions: PaperChordReferenceOriginal, and PaperChordReferenceCrunchy. The original is very simplified, but pretends the ‘locrian’ column can use minor chords (nope, they have to have a diminished fifth) and gets note names wrong by not understanding how sharps and flats work. The crunchy version suggests you should use not only diminished chords, but also sixths and augmented chords, which turns out to be a little intense for silly old guitar players like me. The final version highlights which diminished chords might actually be convenient to play if you wanted, ditches the augmented chords and uses minor sevenths in the dorian column because they sound like you should be playing a cool mode over them (you can drop the seventh down a note if you want to get crunchy and play the sixth that defines the mode, or just stick to the seventh).

Date January 7, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Chris

CloudCoat

MSFlipTimer

SampleUndelay (for Mac AU)

PaperChordReference

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Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

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