Airwindows

Silhouette

TL;DW: Silhouette replaces the sound with raw noise sculpted to match its dynamics.

I thought I’d let people play with the precursor to Texturize, which so far has not made it into the Patreon era of Airwindows… meet Silhouette!

I know what you’re asking. “Why does this plugin look like a busted Subaru in a snowstorm?” And the answer is, it doesn’t: I had a car crash (and did not die! And only blew out a tire, and didn’t go head-on into a truck or anything!) and the busted Subaru is from that. I’ve got it back on the road now, this time with snow tires just in time to absolutely not need them :) and that is purely a side issue and some of why I suddenly stopped constant livestreaming.

Silhouette is not a busted Subaru. It is a busted PLUGIN :D And what it was for is, playing finished music through and seeing if you could still make out a beat. It was an anti-loudness-war plugin, made long ago to illustrate that point. And it replaces the whole sound with a blast of noise which retains the dynamics of the underlying music… if there is any. Dynamics, that is.

Texturize was this, tone-shaped to match the sound of the underlying music (mostly going a lot more bassy). And Texturize proved a lot of fun for people, some of whom asked, can we have that but brighter? So be careful what you wish for. Silhouette now comes with the same wet/dry control as Texturize, so you can use it as a subliminal noise generator. But it’s ALL bright, so you have to turn it down further in order for it to ‘hide’ behind the audio. And that means it can’t really do what Texturize does: it’ll stick out.

But in sticking out, the subliminals it will generate are VERY different from what Texturize does. I’d describe it as hype and energy and tension. Be careful not to turn it up too high: it’ll be incredibly obvious anytime you do. Some sounds, some mixes, will just never work with it.

But isn’t it fun sometimes to not care about that and just try out something wild to see what it does? Silhouette finds its use in that space. I hope you like it.

In other news, though I’m not chasing the livestream thing at the moment (I can occasionally get back into that, I think, just not this last week) I’ve got some plans underway. I’m actively moving towards releasing all the plugins in Raspberry Pi compatible form (thankfully, if this works at all it’ll be a lot more straightforward than the big plugin overhaul of 2022) and have been asked to do more in the line of Evergreens content and how to get classic tones (guitar, bass, drums, keys, what have you). I believe this will be more appropriately done in edited-youtube-video form, so I will need to learn Final Cut Pro and select bands (Steely Dan comes to mind) that aren’t fighting react-channel usage so I can show people how the records are made and play original vinyl so you can hear the real mixes as they are meant to be heard. I’ll work on this, and will continue putting out plugins :)

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
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 20, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Texturize

TL;DW: Texturize is a hidden-noise plugin for adding sonic texture to things.

Texturize.zip(603k)

It all started with snake oil… or should I say secret snake oil?

There’s talk lately of a plugin which has gotten a rather critical reception: a plugin said to put subliminal noise into the sound, to produce near-magical enhancements of tone and all good things. But you can’t hear it directly… you gotta vibe it, listen and embrace the magic, and then you’ll believe…

People were, shall we say, critical of this approach :)

Since I’m free to code what I like, thanks to Patreon and all (and thank you, all who’re pitching in there) I took an interest, and now you have Texturize. It is NOT literally this other plugin, or their patents, or the specific method by which they make the magic concealed noise that makes everything better.

But what it IS, is a riff on several previous plugins I’ve had for years and years, to produce a very similar function… but THIS one, you can tweak and you can also crank it up and listen to only the noise to hear what it’s like. Ruin the magic… but learn how the trick is worked. And it turns out it is really not snake oil at all… it’s just another thing to do with audio, and it does seem to work, and everyone making a plugin of this nature will have their own ‘take’ on it: if you like mine maybe you’ll try out the other folks’ plugin with more of that open mind, having proved that the concept is sound. Or just use mine, which is open source and free :)

You get three controls. Bright makes the effect key off high frequencies more aggressively, to the point of hyping up energy, and Punchy varies between a softer, fuller sound and a real spiky choppy effect. And then there’s Dry/Wet, the heart of the plugin, where settings of 0.5 or less are probably going to keep the noise entirely inaudible, as it’s meant to be. Not heard… but felt. And the sonic transformation’s really interesting, all the more if it’s not obvious. It reminds me of how tape flutter can bring texture to pure tones, chorusing against nearby reflections for a fatter sound, but here it’s just noise… but noise doctored to act like the music and hide behind it.

And then of course you can crank it up until you plainly hear hints of the noise… or slam it until you only hear the noise. But to actually use the plugin properly, keep things at 0.5 and don’t push Bright or Punchy or especially Dry/Wet to where it’s gone too far: tweak it on that subliminal level, turning Wet down if you need to, and see what you get.

I might well start using it. It really does seem to work. Go ahead and fool with it and strip all its secrets… and see whether you believe, too :)

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
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 14, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 12 Comments

Dirt

TL;DW: Dirt is a soft-clip distortion in the spirit of Edge.

Dirt.zip(611k)

In the event that you’d like a softer, tubier Edge… I’ve got you covered.

If you liked Airwindows Edge, this is a variation. It doesn’t go nearly as high gain but it’s got a much softer clip to it, and the same controls set up the same way (so highpass/lowpass settings ought to match if you want them to). My intent with it was to have a companion plugin to Edge for use with ITB guitars: I’d be using it with Cabs, but folks who need full-on IRs might try that too, or sandwiching your IR between Dirt and Cabs as a final tone/presentation tweak.

I hope you like it… and not just on guitars. In line with my current ultrasonic filtering approach, you’ll get more mileage out of this and Edge at high sample rates, but the lowpass will let you get some space between you and aliasing no matter what sample rate you’re at.

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
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 6, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Cabs

TL;DW: Cabs is an Airwindows guitar speaker cabinet simulator.

Cabs.zip(955k)

I think you should listen to this plugin :)

I’ve been asked for ITB guitar plugins before. Never been all that interested, because I like real amps and real tubes etc: have never found a lot of enthusiasm for going to great lengths to digitally fake all the colorations of some amp/speaker or other, because when the soul’s not there the color is irrelevant.

This is different. I took on the challenge of updating my old Cabs plugin: originally dynamically convolved cab impulses, except they hadn’t been MADE with that in mind so it became a series of wild experiments. I wasn’t happy… then.

Cabs completely overhauled everything I’d attempted. It’s undersampled, so it’ll run on whatever sample rate you like, efficiently. It’s got the same tricks of allowing you to heighten the particular speaker coloration it uses, or dial it right back to nothing.

But around that core is a completely different approach to getting ITB amp tones. I’m using the cab size and ‘room loud’ controls to let you dial in the exact presentation you want, from clear and up front power-soaked clearness to complete wall-of-stacks meltdown, and beyond (in classic Airwindows fashion). This is done through an alternate approach to loudness emulation based on the destruction of audio signals through ultimate volume, such as a Space Shuttle takeoff, and what happens to the waveforms there.

I think you should listen to it. Careful that you don’t jump for odd settings right away and get confused: for instance, settings of Room Loud beyond say 0.6 are not really real-world things. Settings of the cab tone intensity beyond 0.6 or 0.7 might be a bit weird. The way the cabs take on character and intensity is related to cab size: everything is basically related to everything else. You have to know what sound you’re trying to get, to clone something real-world. This is not a preset box, at all, at all. You have to be a real guitar tone maven to dial this in to convincing amp clone territory.

OR… or… or!

You can use the range of adjustment here, with the controls that give you a basic idea of ‘what you’re doing and how you want it’, combined with for instance Edge or the upcoming Dirt plugin (softer saturation) to get tones that DO NOT EXIST but act like real amps in significant ways. You can get tones that you can’t get in the real world, and dial them in to match what’s in your head: in some cases maybe to a point that the real world amps couldn’t reach.

And track through them because the whole rig (when using entirely Airwindows plugins) runs NO LATENCY, so it’ll feel as close as it can to the real thing, and respond with electric immediacy.

And then unlike any real amp situation… once you’ve got the final mix done, you can wiggle any of these parameters to where they need to be for THE SONG and tune the tones to best suit whatever else is there, even if it didn’t exist when you were tracking it. This is a freedom of the DAW experience (don’t go too overboard, make decisions!) and it might bring you the results you need.

And all of this can be lightly applied to any other tone: real genuine amp-and-cab that was tracked too quietly or didn’t pick up enough mojo, synths, drums, you name it!

I think you should listen to this plugin. It makes a lot of new things possible and it is free, because I am Patreon-supported and use that to pay the bills and keep myself working full-time on all this.

It’s going to be double-time, too, because I’ve got the results from my testing (anyone who knows my Soundcloud can check this out, download the tracks for 24/96 at https://soundcloud.com/airwindows). I don’t believe long double gains you anything over double, but both are significantly different that using floats for everything, and it’s not all that subtle. And so I am overhauling my entire codebase and redoing ALL the plugins, as straight up double precision, for (on Intel) nearly twice the performance… and overhauling everything that is out of date or uses poor coding practices, while I’m at it. This will affect Linux, for instance: I’ve got a change that will lead to significantly less audio thread blocking from Linux’s rand() call, and everywhere this will give you performance boosts even outside of Linux. It is a colossal task. I hope you folks like the results, which will take more than weeks but less than months, I think.

I’ll be getting back to work now, thanks for hearing me out and I hope you like Cabs :)

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
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 27, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 10 Comments

Chris

Silhouette

Texturize

Dirt

Cabs

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club