Airwindows

Exciter

TL;DW: Exciter is an Aural Exciter plugin that can be both subtle and extreme.

This plugin isn’t my usual jam, but I’ve been listening to this type of effect all my life. The Steely Dan album ‘The Royal Scam’ wouldn’t be the same without the Exciter effect. And now it’s a free Airwindows plugin!

Note that this is NOT a clone of hardware, or any particular brand. As I usually do, I’ve extracted the guts of the effect and then adapted it so it can be used normally or exaggerated. You’ll find that as you apply the effect, it’ll start off sounding like it does nothing, gets more and more intense and then suddenly blows up into crazy distortion. To use it like a normal exciter, fine-tune it so that it’s just barely making transients ‘pop’. If you’re hearing obvious crunch, you’ve already got it cranked up higher than real-world examples would let you do.

The effect works like this: get a sharp band filter going to extract certain kinds of information. Distort it with a soft clip (I use a sin() function, and some real-world examples used a 4049 hex inverter chip, which does a very similar super soft distort when used as an audio effect: it’s the chip that made up Craig Anderton’s ‘Tube Sound Fuzz’ circuit back in the day, and I still have lots of these chips to play with :D ) Then, once you’ve distorted this bandpass, add just only the distortion elements back into the full bandwidth signal, by subtracting the bandpass again.

Exciter lets you adjust the frequency you’re using, and dial in the amount of effect you want. I’m pretty sure it’ll consistently sound good (not quite natural, but this is ‘late seventies heightened detail’ tone here, it doesn’t have to sound natural) if you’re careful to not crank it too much. And of course this is Airwindows, you can crank it on stuff that doesn’t have much to excite, and blast it on bright stuff to make a distinct form of gritty evil distortion for effect.

A lot of the stuff I like in analog is when transistors and chips are misused and freaking out. You can get tones like that out of Exciter, if you like. You can put it in the middle of uLaw, if you like. I’ve not tried that so you can be the first. I hope you enjoy Exciter :)

download StarterKit.zip for just the basics
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 October 10, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

ZRegion2 (and ZRegion)

TL;DW: ZRegion2 is an Emu e6400 style Airwindows Region filter, with coefficient smoothing.

ZRegion2.zip(667k)
ZRegion.zip(657k)

Here’s one I might be needing in future, so I’m putting it out for everybody to have!

The Airwindows Z series filters are kinds of digital filtering, with sampler hardware emulation put on ’em for added color and vividness, plus a staggering capacity for gain (folks using the original samplers often internally distorted sound with gain boosts in order to get maximum color out of the Emu filters).

But what if there’s a filter type that didn’t even exist on the original device?

ZRegion is that filter. The original Airwindows Region wasn’t written in the context of an Emu Z emulation, more like just experimentation. It uses the cascading filter stages and distortions in an interesting way: you’re using bandpass filters and distorting them, but Region lets you stagger the bandpass frequencies so that you’re successively distorting through series of different filters. A bit hard to explain, but it lets you distort on midrangey frequencies and soften into the bass, or start out with bass clipping and then exaggerate that effect with higher frequencies.

The reason I might be needing this one is, I can get pretty killer bass tones using it. I’ll set the first filter higher for midrange articulation, set the last filter very low for heavy bass mojo, and it’s instantly a bass-amp type of sound. And if I intend to leave the setting as a fixed setting, ZRegion will give me that with the same flavor as my other Z filters.

But if I want to automate or move the controls as part of the mix…

ZRegion2 comes out at the same time as ZRegion, but note that I’m still putting out ZRegion. This is because ZRegion will always run at lower CPU than ZRegion2, because the first plugin doesn’t do coefficient smoothing. It’s for if you have a fixed tone setting to use, OR if you want to have a slight glitchy/zipper-noise quality on some audio and you’re moving the controls.

If you’re going for automation, the Z2 filters are the ones that interpolate the coefficients across the sample buffer, meaning they’ll make control changes smooth. No crackling! This eats more CPU, but a lot of the fun with these filters comes from actively manipulating them. The original sampler never had a Region filter type, but now you can make believe it did, and produce aggressive and textural bandpass-y effects across a broader range than the original sampler’s ZBandpass. Hope you like it!

download StarterKit.zip for just the basics
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 October 2, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

PitchNasty

TL;DW: PitchNasty is a primitive pitch shifter that also has primitive time-stretch artifacts.

PitchNasty.zip(615k)

So this is a bit unusual. Though this is a sound mangler, there’s no bit crushing here, and in fact most of the time it’s delivering a very high-res immediate and punchy pitch shift, super clean and tight.

It’s just that the rest of the time it’s throwing a nasty, loud sample-glitch, at audio rates. No, beyond that. It’s throwing digital trash at you so hard it becomes a musical note!

And therein lies the secret of PitchNasty. This plugin brings you the heart of old school digital like your classic Akai stuff, back when they did not have the luxury of doing anything elegantly or nicely. Instead, you got things like time stretches that just plain looped a tight time cycle and overlapped it, producing a weird digital honk. Some folks really seem to crave that stuff, and there’s a reason.

Turns out if you do that, your results tend to be very punchy, direct and intense, except for the weird robotic overtone that’s welded to the sound like it’s a musical note. Things like drums love being timestretched or repitched in this way! It’s a whole retro tone, which PitchNasty starts off with. The crossover is very slightly ‘clever’ in a way the retro stuff isn’t, for the purpose of making it sound more retro and less DAW-like: it keeps the presence very high while slightly masking the high frequency edge of the ‘note’ you get.

But then PitchNasty goes way beyond, in that Airwindows way. You’ve got two pitch controls, one giving you note intervals in half-steps, and the other being a pure pitch bend. They stack, for really high or low bends. Then, there’s a control that’s the same as the classic Akai method of setting the sample buffer size… but for this one, you specify the buffer as a musical note (six octave range). Set it insanely high and you’re basically not able to pitch shift anymore because the buffer’s too small, set it insanely low and it barely registers as a note anymore. And then after that, how about a feedback? How about a feedback that can be cranked to more or less constant regeneration? This gives you horrible wonderful old Eventide noises of many descriptions, or you can use traces of it to make your existing sound more complicated and harmonic-dense.

And then the whole thing’s followed by a Dry/Wet, and you can see that PitchNasty sticks so tightly to the underlying sound that you can get it acting like a giant flanger or strange overtone generator. And that’s the other secret of the crude old Akai-like time/pitch processing: when you don’t have any RAM or CPU to work with, you can only do naive primitive things that happen to sound really immediate, direct, alive. It doesn’t lose the impact of a drum track. If you set it up to thicken a snare by applying, Eventide-like, a 30% layer of pitch up (or down, with feedback), there is no flam or hesitation to the sound like more sophisticated algorithms would have to do. Instead, it’s just THERE in the sound, with a hefty dose of digital gnarliness, but woven right in to make a very 80s composite sound that’s huge and fierce.

If you would like to use this as a time stretch, what you should do is open the source sound in an editor, change the sample rate without resampling until you have the new pitch you want and apply that, resample it back to what your working sample rate is (use a good resampling method, you don’t need to use a bad one), THEN use PitchNasty to re-pitch it to what the target pitch is. That’ll give you the time-stretch artifacts, because they are really just pitch-change artifacts used in a different light. Hope you like PitchNasty!

download StarterKit.zip for just the basics
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 September 26, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Pockey2

TL;DW: Pockey2 is more efficient, more intense lo-fi hiphop in a plugin.

Pockey2.zip(620k)

So this is pretty rapid iteration. I’d been struggling with getting Pockey to willingly do 12 bit: the algorithm didn’t seem to like it, even crashed when I tried to go for 16 bit. Turns out it was counting bit by bit in order to do the analog bitcrushing thing. And there was another way to do it… but then other things had to change… and then other ideas started to happen…

Suffice to say, it earned its new version number.

Pockey2 takes the basic concept of Pockey and brings in an entirely fresh character, while running way more efficiently. Instead of analog-style floating point bitcrushing, it’s integer… but you’ll find the difference between 5037 ‘stairsteps’ and 5038 ‘stairsteps’ will amount to about the same thing, just way more easy on the CPU. Still uLaw, still a big sampler-esque texture, now letting you go from 4 bit all the way to 16 bit at no CPU penalty. There’s not a lot of point running 16 bit here as it’s still uLaw, but in case you’re looking for just the lightest possible ‘sampler’ touch on your 24 bit DAW track, you’ve got it.

Instead of analog-style floating point frequency crushing, that’s integer too… which means the adjustability of the super-bright frequency crushing will be ‘steppy’, not allowing fine adjustments especially if the DAW’s at 44.1k. But if you’re running 96k, you get a much broader range of adjustment! And you get to frequency crush down way lower than before… and the tone! Another reason Pockey2 is a new version number is that, while the tone of the frequency crush on Pockey was interesting and vibey, the stuff you can do with the different-sounding Pockey2 is beyond belief. Experiment with the DeFreq control and see what you get. There’s a little bit of the ‘sweep the digital sampler cutoff point’ still there, especially at deeper frequency crushes, but Pockey2 shines when finding just the right spot to entirely transform a sound into pure lo-fi hip hop classic sampler madness. Even more than the original Pockey, this one can completely transform a sound into retro digital.

You can use both. If you like Pockey and find its CPU use too heavy, DeRez it more, it struggles to get to high bit depths. If you like Pockey2, it doesn’t struggle with anything except sometimes with slowly sweeping a frequency crush way up high. I hope you like both Pockeys and find your best use for them :)

download StarterKit.zip for just the basics
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 September 18, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Chris

Exciter

ZRegion2 (and ZRegion)

PitchNasty

Pockey2

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club