Airwindows

kPlateA

TL;DW: kPlateA is a plate reverb, not unlike its namesake atop Abbey Road :)

So I just happened to turn my efforts to plate reverbs last week, since the internet exploded over some plugin drama and some of the plugins in question just happened to be models of some specific plate reverbs in a famous place: atop Abbey Road Studios. There were four of them, and I’m sure I can’t make a plugin to model those exact ones, as the rights to the name are probably all tied up. And I wouldn’t suggest that I tried to make reverb plugins MORE realistic than those made by this company with rights to the name. That would be rude! :D

But I bet nothing is stopping me from making plugins and using the LETTER. And indeed nothing is stopping me from finding examples of dry sound and then the sound of these other plugins, and using that as a reference to the lettered EMT plate reverb on top of Abbey Road, or indeed figuring out that this other company rather overprocessed its stuff and finding ways to get a similar effect that’s cleaner, deeper and more intense.

It’s actually a really interesting puzzle to do this sort of thing… especially when you don’t really have good reference yet, as it’s all happening so fast. But now you have kPlateA. And in it, you might just have a new best plate reverb. It’s using multiple fancy Householder feedforward matrices, all sorts of filtering, undersampling to make it useable at 96k and 192k, and seeing as it was developed on my antique Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard, I daresay it both sounds better and runs better than its competition.

Oh, one more thing: you get to own it. And by that I mean, not only do you get it maintained and supported for free (thanks to a thriving Patreon and those who help me), but it is also MIT-licensed open source code. So you get to own it, in the sense of you can take the code and skin it with a big GUI with pictures of plate reverbs with funny waves drawn on them, if you feel that is really necessary. You just have to credit Airwindows.

Or, you may find that the way this can sit in the mix, means the GUI with pictures of plate reverbs with funny waves drawn on them, isn’t really as necessary as you thought it was :)

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 April 2, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 6 Comments

Pafnuty2

TL;DW: Pafnuty2 is a Chebyshev filter, that adds harmonics, and fits in the VCV Rack port.

Pafnuty2.zip(507k)

Pafnuty is a Chebyshev filter. What are those? Well, it’s not much like your usual filter: you don’t use this to roll off highs or lows (though under some conditions you might be able to do any of those things). A Chebyshev filter is like a mathematical formula. It works like this: if you feed it a sine wave (at exactly 0dB, or barely-clipping) it can generate entirely new sine waves to add to your sine wave. Which ones? Harmonically related ones. You can have twice, three, four times the frequency, all the way up to thirteenth harmonic.

What do you get when you run music into this sine-multiplying filter? If your audio has no frequencies that, multiplied, go higher than the sampling rate, you get perfect aliasing-free harmonic enhancement. The way the filter works, it absolutely doesn’t generate anything higher than the multipliers it works with. It’s a sort of color-adding harmonic enhancement where you can pick what kind of coloration you add (or subtract, since all the controls go both ways). If the frequencies do go higher than the sampling rate then they do alias, but the way Pafnuty resists adding extra harmonics helps it to resist aliasing and if you don’t add lots of higher harmonics you can go very high in frequency, cleanly.

Now that it fits into the VCV Rack port, you can run a sine LFO into it, and then all sorts of other LFOs into all the parameters, to produce a bizarre modular hyper-LFO, and that’s why I knew this one needed updating :)

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 March 26, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 6 Comments

SampleDelay

TL;DW: SampleDelay is three delays combined: millisecond, sample and subsample.

SampleDelay.zip(493k)

SampleDelay is a very simple thing, implemented in a particular way. It’s not exactly an echo (though it can be), not exactly a timing adjustment tool, not exactly a sound shaper… more like, a little of all of those things.

You’ve got up to 100 milliseconds of delay on the first control. On the second, you have 0 to 10 samples of delay, exactly. And on the third control, you have zero to one sample: you have a subsample trim. They all work separately and combine into a single delay, with an inverse/dry/wet control on the fourth slider.

Why? Why like this?

Sure, you can use part-dry and part-wet for a single slapback echo. Sure, you could set it to half-inverse and have total cancellation and make a comb-filter effect, or set it full wet… or full inverse… for a small timing adjustment on a multimiked setup.

But let’s consider that multimike setup. Suppose we’re trying to get a snare mike in phase with nearby overheads. Well, one thing we could do is isolate the snare mic with an overhead, and set the snare to fully inverse (assuming the mic’s phase isn’t also flipped…) and dial in the timing to cancel as much as possible. Then, go to the opposite (inverse or wet) and you have your fully in phase signal.

Same with multimiked guitar cabs. Find the beef by canceling it and then flipping from inverse to wet (or vice versa)

Or, go for effect and have the spot mike stay inverted and don’t bring it up as much, and it’ll make things more bright and complex… or put it slightly off for a tonal shift. Three separately adjustable delay ranges down to the finest you could have, and the one inv/wet control to let you quickly do whatever you want.

There’s a reason I’ve been asked to bring this one back. Hope you like it. For some this will be a very boring effect. For others… not :)

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 March 19, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

CStrip2

TL;DW: CStrip2 refines and optimizes CStrip, by request!

CStrip2.zip(559k)

It’s been a while since we’ve seen an Airwindows channel strip! Here’s why CStrip2 is here.

First, I was asked to do it. Specifically, I was asked to take the delay-trim and gate out of CStrip, and also to replace the highpass and lowpass with Capacitor, and keep the compressor exactly as it is, and also could I put a saturation effect on the end? That sort of thing doesn’t always click with me, but hang on a moment, there’s more.

Second, we’ve got an Airwindows port to VCV Rack (which might expand to a CLAP, or more, along the same lines) but it’s limited to ten controls. There are only two Airwindows plugins with more than ten controls. One is Pafnuty (which would be well suited to Rack or Rack-like environments). The other… is CStrip.

Or WAS, because CStrip2 is here!

There are also related things. It seems to me the EQ technique I use might fit in future versions of Console that include built-in EQ, and model famous recording desks, especially old ones. That’s not to say the CStrip EQ is designed to do that, because it’s not: but it covers some interesting bases, like saturating boosts to bring them forward and unsaturating cuts to drop them back, and the relatively shallow slopes lend themselves to fixed-frequency built in EQ bands. There are classic desk topologies where the channels and busses have idiosyncratic choices for the EQ bands, and to model that would tend to bring outputs into the realms of classic albums done on those desks. I’ve got more Console summing algorithms in the works to support this exploration.

Oh, and that output saturation goes like this: 0 to 1/3 is dry signal, 1/3 to 2/3 crossfades into Spiral like it is on the plugin Channel (versions 7, 8 and 9 have this) and 2/3 to 1 crossfades into the Density algorithm for maximum fatness and drive. This is probably going to be fun for people to play with, or leave it below 1/3 if you want clean output.

That’s CStrip2! I hope you like it :)

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 March 12, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Chris

kPlateA

Pafnuty2

SampleDelay

CStrip2

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