Airwindows

ZLowpass

TL;DW: ZLowpass is a lowpass made to sound and act like the Emu e6400 Ultra lowpass.

Onward! Today we have ZLowpass. I think this one might be the closest to the hardware yet! It works like my previous Z series filters, except it’s the lowpass this time.

You might notice my video looks a bit different: that’s because my Blackmagic ATEM Mini finally and permanently blew up. I’m pretty sure I know why: there were times I ran it for long periods, I’ve often run many inputs into it or had it working hard doing things like chromakeying/lumakeying stuff at higher resolution and downscaling the result to HD, or running my laptop’s HDMI feed into it and having it upscale THAT to the higher native resolution, overlay the main camera and then downscale again to HD. On top of that, I’ve had it sitting on top of my Lavry DAC, and we’ve had some heat waves this summer.

So, it melted. For a while it just had its input to the computer die (I found a Razer capture card to be more reliable) and then in some livestreams it’s been flaking out, and tonight it blew up for good and couldn’t even run a single camera. Anyone out there, be careful with these things. They’re just $300 or so, but you cannot push them too hard in warm conditions or they will melt. Or maybe the fan blew up. I know I can’t return it under warranty because, being me, I took it apart to see if I could make the cooling work better. Too little too late. Be warned and don’t run these little buggers hard, or do lots of up and downscaling, while sitting them on a warm thing. No more ATEM Mini.

Until I get another, that is, and this time will NOT touch a thing about it, will fill in any warranty card it has, and will probably get a little laptop cooler pad or something. Whatever it takes, because my setup ended up pretty sweet if it wasn’t for the thing melting under the strain. (Replacement of the ATEM will NOT be out of what I’m saving up for getting a bigger and more classic sampler. Never fear, that journey will progress unhindered.)

Anyway, here’s ZLowpass :D

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 August 29, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

ZBandpass

TL;DW: ZBandpass is a bandpass made to sound and act like the Emu e6400 Ultra bandpass.

ZBandpass.zip(620k)

On we go! If you’re following this project, well, this is the Bandpass version. This and ZHighpass have been adjusted to allow for more output gain (so you can work with less distorted things and balance them better with dry signal, using the left half of the Poles control to do it).

Hope you like it! Monday, we livestream the Lowpass version! That should be fun :D

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 August 22, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

ZHighpass

TL;DW: ZHighpass is a highpass made to sound and act like the Emu e6400 Ultra highpass.

ZHighpass.zip(620k)

And here… we… go!

I picked the highpass to attempt first off the e6400 because it’s way harder. In recordings of the real unit, if you overdrive the samples you can hear how the machine flips out when you sweep the highpass up real high. Part of this is from the output stages of the device having characteristics not unlike Mackity: you get a strange overshoot, and that’s from the hardware.

These are not exactly ’emulations’ in the sense of stealing all the code out of the 6400 and then modeling the entire circuit and basically jacking the whole thing. That’s not what I do, and that stuff always ends up sounding very plastic to my ear (way too much overprocessing to try and get the fiddly details the same: you end up with a clone, but soulless)

Instead, ZHighpass is first in a series of Z-plugins, building on what I learned with the X series, and designed to act and respond the same as the real deal, but in the box. I got as close as I could with my own techniques, using some details (like where the filters hard-clip, and the likely Q factors) to zero in further. My hope is not as much that I’ve perfectly duplicated every detail of the hardware device… but that I made a plugin with enough of the soul of that device, that you can get equally musical results out of it. You should be able to USE ZHighpass much the way you’d use the real sampler and its genuine Z-Plane filters, to get filter swoops and voicings that deliver as much of the aggressive mojo you’d enjoy from the real thing.

Except that you can take it a little bit farther, and adjust it in ways not available on the real-deal sampler, to your taste. ‘Cos we’re not here just to clone what DnB maestros did in the Nineties. We’re playing with this particular sampler and mimicking some of its tricks because it turns out that was an amazing-sounding instrument, that gave you stuff typical DAW EQs don’t even come close to offering. And now, with ZHighpass, you can easily turn your DAW into that kind of instrument, on as many tracks as you like, anytime and anywhere you like.

And the cooling fan’s (probably) way quieter. And it’s easier to patch. Props to the real e6400 Ultra, though. You’ll be hearing more from that, in upcoming weeks.

(I updated this plugin to have more output gain: if you need the original one just the way it went out, it’s here at ZHighpassOriginal.zip(620k)

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 August 15, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

PitchDelay

TL;DW: PitchDelay is TapeDelay2 but with pitch shift instead of flutter.

PitchDelay.zip(622k)

So I was at a a synthesizer meet-up talking with some folks and someone asked me if I could do a particular thing. I’d mentioned how my TapeDelay2, which I was about to post that very night, would let you wiggle around the speed control and you’d get crazy wobble JUST like if you were doing it on a tape deck, because of the way I ran the delay buffers. And the request was to make a plugin where the time would wobble but the pitch would not, perhaps using some pitch shifter algorithm.

And… I did not make that thing! :D but I made this instead, and here you go!

All this is, is TapeDelay2 but instead of the flutter control, it’s got a fixed pitch shift. It’s being done in a more normal way than Glitch Shifter, but for all that it still enables some silly and extreme noises. Everything not flutter/pitch knob related, is exactly the same: all my development time went towards making the pitch shift interesting.

If you shift up, you can go towards very shrill crazy up-shifts that are right to the edge of blowing up the plugin. If you shift down, you can drop pitch down to literally nothing… and then keep going until you’re doing reverse buffer looping, which ends up (at a setting of 0) being the same pitch you started with, but backwards. Except it’s not playing the actual audio backwards, it’s cycling the algorithm backwards while the sound still plays ‘forwards’, so you get a ‘voice disguise’ effect. Sneak the setting just off the zero point, and it’s backwards low-speed, good for alien monster voices. If you include the regeneration while doing this you get a glorious mess. Also, the regeneration can be set to WAY more than just feedback, but it subtly restrains itself a bit so that you can hover around total feedback in a usable way. This combined with pitch shifting settings and the filter that comes with TapeDelay2 can give you a whole pile of strange, sorta-analogy noises without even putting more sounds in (it does require some sort of noise beyond digital black to start with, but once it’s going you’ll be able to play it like a weird instrument)

Add this to your Tape Delay arsenal. It’s not part of TapeDelay because it’s weird enough to be its own purpose (dedicated plugins for purposes is more or less my thing). 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 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 August 8, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Chris

ZLowpass

ZBandpass

ZHighpass

PitchDelay

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