Airwindows

RingModulator

TL;DW: RingModulator repitches sounds mathematically, not harmonically.

RingModulator in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Effects’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
RingModulator.zip (711k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Here’s an effect not for every day or the master buss! (pause, for fans to immediately insist that they use it on their master buss and it changed their life)

So, this is probably the major offshoot from SquareRoot apart from its use as an overdrive. RingModulator is like LRConvolve, except you always have the most polite possible convolver (a sine) and you get to control it to do whatever you like, from subsonic LFO throbs to very high pitches. In fact, when you’re in stereo you get two independent sines to play with!

The rest is simply a ring modulator, the device that makes voices into Daleks or electric pianos into oddly clangy discordant inharmonic sounds. Ring modulators can produce mathematically, not harmonically, related sounds. That means it ‘tracks’ quickly to whatever your raw sound is, but the notes it adds are out of tune: going off, or even going in the reverse of your original note’s direction.

That’s because if you take a note, and convolve it by a nearby note, you’ll produce a higher note but also a strong subharmonic. Since the ring modulator is flipping phase at musical frequencies, it can produce an apparent note way lower than itself or the source note, through that interference. It’ll also tend to cut the lows in the source audio if it’s at a high frequency, because if you’re constantly flipping the phase of a bass note it kinda goes away on you.

Then to top it off, RingModulator has the Soar control… so you can wildly alter the texture of the additional notes (including stereo added notes when you’ve got the Freq controls set to different settings) by either reducing Soar for a gatey, thin sound, or boosting it for a dense and lively sound! The reason Soar’s important here is because convolving stuff is multiplying, and if you square something (multiply it by itself) and then take a square root you get the original thing back. So Soar is my way of restoring the density of the original sound coming in, except that it opens up a new way to alter the tone of things.

Hope you like it!

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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.

Date March 9, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

LRConvolve2

TL;DW: LRConvolve2 multiplies each channel by the other, plus Soar!

LRConvolve2 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Utility’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
LRConvolve2.zip (489k) standalone(AU, VST2)

We’ve had this (along with its strange demonstration audio) and you’ve already seen this ‘Soar’ control on the recent ‘SquareRoot’ plugin, which is going to be a lot more generally useful.

But have you heard the essence of the Soar control turned into a plugin, to most drastically demonstrate what it does?

Nope, because SquareRoot typically sounds fine however you set it. But now you can!

I don’t remove plugins that work, so this doesn’t replace LRConvolve (I’m not sure who would care if it did, but it’s the principle of the thing). But you can get the LRConvolve sound out of it easily enough by turning Soar up ALL the way. So there’s a start: the ‘crazy’ can be dialed back through turning down the Soar control. Both channels still completely convolve and phase-flip each other, and it still results in an intense mess of audio.

But when you run more typical sounds against each other (rather than using something predictable like a full-amplitude sine), suddenly a whole new behavior emerges. Turns out, if you reduce Soar on this algorithm and have two sounds convolving each other, there’s a full range of behavior between ‘mostly choked out’ and ‘hypercompressed and exaggerated’! This will also apply to some extent to SquareRoot, except that LRConvolve2 highlights the behavior because more sounds will be forced into the ‘quiet’ zone where Soar operates.

For that reason, it might come in handy just sussing out how the algorithm works as it’s used in SquareRoot: or, using it like the original LRConvolve but with additional tonal control that’s unique to what that plugin is. I’m working on other plugins such as the Bezier-curve compressor for ConsoleH, plus a wild project (sort of an art project) around making literal boutique stompboxes, so if this isn’t the plugin for you, wait a week and I’ll make another :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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.

Date March 2, 2025
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Yaeltex ConsoleX is available! (and a mini-me version!)

TL;DW: rightly so, it’s a half hour video.

AirwindowmationForReaper.zip (14k) is just some text files in a folder.

This is an announcement and an update! You can buy ConsoleX to run ConsoleX (the MIDI controller I have, to run my ConsoleX plugins) here:
https://yaeltex.com/product/consolex/

You can also jump directly to the ‘Factory’ pages for this and the Mini-Me version, with these links (they will open a controller-editor web page that lets you play with the design tools without making you buy anything):
Factory Build for ConsoleX with faders
Factory Build for the ConsoleX Mini version

If you want to set up the fader version, or just have faders and want to run Airwindowmation, the zip up top is the latest version! I’m using it currently. It wasn’t easy to set up but I managed it, and once it’s there and working it’s less trouble to operate.

The changes to it are all about what the fader position translates to. I was making mixes and the faders all had to sit really low, so the new Airwindowmation takes the input position, and gives the plugin that position… to the power of the number of tracks OF that color, plus one!

All that means is, for single tracks it adds a ‘taper’ so the fader can ride in the middle of its travel. And then, if you layer on lots more tracks onto that colorcoded fader, the taper changes so it always wants to have ‘normal mix volume’ in the middle of the fader’s travel. No matter how many tracks it controls, the value of the fader will be able to drop to zero at the bottom of the fader, and if you crank it all the way up you’ll get full crank no matter how many tracks there are. It just makes them all use the middle of the fader as ‘normal volume’.

My hope is, that’s an easy and natural way to pass fader settings into the ConsoleX plugin’s fader control, by colorcoding the tracks to go along with faders.

I get nothing from Yaeltex, this is just because I made my design there and like their controllers. I don’t think there’s any kind of price break, either. It’s just me letting you start with my designs (or just use them directly if you like) and get a controller like the one I got :)

Date February 28, 2025
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Elliptical

TL;DW: Elliptical highpasses the side channel.

Elliptical in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Bass’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Elliptical.zip (504k) standalone(AU, VST2)

So this is by request: I got asked whether it was possible for me to make a great elliptical EQ. And of course I said ‘well, ToVinyl does that though it also does some other things’, and it’s been a while since I did ToVinyl plus it’s partly designed to produce sound as if it’s FROM vinyl, with the groovewear control (which itself became other plugins like GrooveWear and CrunchyGrooveWear), and what if I was able to do a standalone elliptical EQ that’s way better?

Here’s how I did. ToVinyl uses a weird early technique I liked, trying to steepen a very simple IIR filter by using many poles: this would be great if it worked! Instead, it doesn’t really steepen nearly as much, and then it’s implemented in a way where it kinda resonates. End result is almost a ‘color’ EQ, with huge amounts of phase shifting: it will take a distorted bassy clipped noise and turn it into giant bass peaks over a wide range, and that’s ToVinyl.

And so I was asked back then if I could make a better highpass, just a stereo mastering highpass, by Gregg of Hermetech Mastering, and Hermepass took shape, with way fewer poles but arranged differently: going up to the desired point, but then with each new pole dropping back by the Golden Ratio towards roughly 20 hz at the lowest, and lastly the poles got introduced with mini dry/wet controls between each step, something that got used in the four stages of cascaded filtering in the Z series filters, but Hermepass had this for six stages of increasingly deeper cutoff.

It remains a solid, tonally clear highpass filter: not a brickwall, but one where you can cut the lows and really not hear where the cut is. That’s the intention. And that’s where I got the highpass for Elliptical. If you like the one you’ll like the other. The interesting thing about using it for an elliptical filter is, you can filter incredibly hard without hearing it change the sound. In demonstrating it I had to make use of Golem, to show an out-of-phase sound that’s literally just the side channel. Otherwise, it fools you into thinking everything’s still full bass.

And of course that’s the goal with an elliptical filter: these aren’t about sound effects, they’re about stopping the side channel from modulating the depth of a vinyl groove, or about using stereo woofers most efficiently. And that’s where Elliptical shines. Keep Golem handy if you have to spot check what the filter’s doing, find useful settings and then trust that even though it sounds like there’s a lot of heavy stereo bass, it’s really just an illusion and Elliptical is controlling the heck out of it, while pretending the sound is unchanged :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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.

Date February 23, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Chris

RingModulator

LRConvolve2

Yaeltex ConsoleX is available! (and a mini-me version!)

Elliptical

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club