Airwindows

Iron Oxide Classic 2

TL;DW: IronOxideClassic2 is my bandpassy tape sim, updated for high sample rate and aliasing control.

Here’s a preview of things to come, shown on a blast from the past :)

Iron Oxide was one of my first successful plugins. It’s an old school tape emulation, meaning that it’s kind of bandpassy and is about saturating and slamming and aggressive tone coloring. It was made to compete with a pricey (well, back then it was) commercial plugin where the company had treated some of my friends poorly: I charged off and made a ‘commercial tape emulation killer’ plugin, with very unorthodox techniques. This is before my ToTape plugins, before head bumps: just a fat saturated tape-slam plugin.

This grew to have all sorts of things: separate ips controls for low and high cutoffs, flutter, just lots of stuff. But the original one was an input, a tape speed control, and an output… and Iron Oxide Classic is me returning to those roots. It’s also handy, because as I bring in stuff like undersampling of delay buffer plugins, I can get the fundamentals right on a simpler build. That’s what this is. It’s Iron Oxide Classic, the simplest form, but brought up to the latest technical specs.

That means it’s using the undersampling to deliver the same tone whether you’re at 44.1k or 96k or 192k. Though it uses delay buffers and samples along a time window, in the new version that’s consistent among sample rates. That also means it’s substantially more CPU-friendly at high rates, so you might be able to run twice or four times as many of ’em. It’s also using anti-aliasing filtering (that kicks in at high rates and isn’t ‘in circuit’ at low rates) to clean up its behavior still further. The end result is that the new Iron Oxide Classic has a way more organic, natural tone than the previous one did. These things (and running projects at 2X or 4X) really help get the analog vibe out of ITB digital gear. Since Iron Oxide Classic 2 is able to adapt to this stuff gracefully, that also means it’ll handle rendering at 2x or 4X sample rate should your workflow require working at 1X and then rendering out the final audio at a higher rate. Mind you, I design stuff so you’ll be able to work directly at the higher rate, but this should have you covered whatever your workflow.

I’ve got plenty more to do, you’ll see: Patreon is how I’m able to do this full time. I’m also committed to answering higher levels of Patreon support with increasingly cool and generous stuff given to the community: that’s going well, again, you’ll see. For now, if you like this plugin so much that you’d have bought it, use the Patreon, same if you’d have willingly paid an upgrade fee. We both know you don’t have to pay anything, and indeed I encourage people who are struggling to take care of themselves first and trust that I will be there if you start to thrive and have money to spend: for years now I have designed my Patreon so that it is ALL community generosity and there is not a thing that you can’t have, free, with my blessing. So it’s all good, and I appreciate the support, and I show my appreciation by continuing to advance the state of my plugins week after week :)

Date March 14, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Verbity

TL;DW: Verbity is my new best reverb, which uses feedforward reverb topology.

Verbity.zip(369k)

Late nights of reverb hacking (ok, Monday mornings?) give rise to a new best reverb. At least, best for me. Perhaps it’ll count as ‘best’ in general, we shall see, that is rather a matter of taste but it’s my new favorite and is inspiring me a lot.

Meet Verbity.

This came from experiments in feedforward reverb topology, something Casey from Bricasti likes to recommend. Well, I can see why! Verbity uses the same Householder reverb matrices as the previous Reverb and MatrixVerb, but instead of each bank feeding back on itself, each bank feeds another bank and only the very last one of three, feeds back to the start again. I’m going to call this innovative not because it’s such a novel concept, but because it’s innovative to me, as I’d never figured that stuff out before. There are interesting things having to do with how you arrange the delay times across the three banks, and I’ve got some concepts from MV going for less sustainy spaces that should help spatial plausibility, and I’ve made some choices around the wetness and filter controls that are a little unusual.

Bottom line is, listen to this thing! I’m real happy with the tone of it. I feel it sort of kills all my previous reverbs, which is awkward when I named one of them ‘Reverb’, but my namespace issues won’t affect your reverb tones. Just listen! Casey’s a wise man, and was certainly right about the usefulness of feedforward networks. I haven’t got any of his code or any other hints from him… but all the same, that one detail made a huge difference.

The Darkness control has one quirk to be aware of: you can adjust it all the way to total darkness, 1.0 which translates to complete lowpass filter. Be aware that if you do that, you can trap DC energy inside the filter, so if you’re going for extreme filtration try to adjust so that the value is nearly 1.0 without actually being it. For most purposes that should work: I just don’t like to restrict the controls. For any normal use you won’t have Darkness nearly that high anyhow.

The Wetness control is not exactly a traditional Dry/Wet, so I’m using Wetness as the name. What it does is, as you increase it you add Wet up to 0.5 setting without turning down Dry AT ALL. Verbity can be used on stems and busses in a Console mix to put excellent custom reverb spaces on things, and set up this way you’re not constantly shifting your dry-signal level when adjusting, you’re just adjusting the verb level in there. If you go beyond 0.5, you start attenuating Dry while leaving Wet at full crank, and for sends you’ll want Wetness to be 1.0 just as it would be with a Dry/Wet.

This is a dual mono verb, so for now you don’t gain anything adding Srsly2 unless you have actual stereo content going in. Centered stuff is going to stay centered. You might not notice right off since it’s so deep, so I’m telling you. This is consistent with my other reverbs, except that MatrixVerb and Reverb are able to add stereo pitch bending which will spread center content. Verbity is your basic Airwindows Bricasti-style reverb, which also means it doesn’t have pitch shifting: Casey doesn’t like it, and this is an exploration into the things Casey’s talked about publically, to see if his wisdom leads to better reverbs.

Signs point to yes :)

These explorations are made possible by Patreon: this is one of those ones where I feel pretty comfortable saying, if you would have bought this at $50 perpetual license for all your machines, please kick another $50 per year in on the ol’ Patreon. I’m working on a whole pile of things right now, but this feels like a high point in plugin releases. Though if you did that for either of my previous reverbs, call this a free update and thank you for that. They tried, but they weren’t as good as the feedforward reverb could be :)

Date March 7, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 6 Comments

PurestConsole2

TL;DW: PurestConsole2 is the anti-aliasing version of PurestConsole, with special brightness and clarity!

PurestConsole2.zip(709k)

Hi! My video is showing off the plugin I’ve been coding on Monday livestreams, but it’s not the new plugin for the week! It’s for next week.

What’s this week is… firstly a hell of a lot of studio upgrades, new music, better video support thanks to a Razer HDMI capture box and a new custom LUT just for the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 4k cameras, did I mention new music? I was composing and tracking it all day or at least since 3. Actually kind of a lot to get done in six hours.

But it was all because I needed to show off the new plugin… or plugins. Meet PurestConsole2.

This serves a special purpose in modern Airwindows Console mixes. I’ve got Console7, which gives you all the glue you could want, creates solidity and the sense of an analog mixing desk (all the more if you use Console7Cascade, which I’m avoiding for this track and this video). But Console7 does its aliasing prevention by rolling off right at 20k, which helps the sense of glue but steps on some of the super-sparkly treble you sometimes get in modern mixes. It’s set up to do it really gracefully, but some have noticed a diminishing of super-glittery highs.

PurestConsole was always the ‘colorless, transparent’ take on any Console system, but with PurestConsole2 we’re stepping just a bit away from that, to serve as a complement to Console7. PurestConsole2 does the same ‘filter the super-highs to prevent aliasing’ thing that Console7 does. BUT, not quite the same. It starts higher (run it at 44 or 48k and it won’t even attempt to filter) to extend to 30k before filtering. But then it filters SHARPER… to roll off quicker. And in doing that, it gives you a presence peak beyond hearing. Not a huge one, but it’s there: it’s also on the end of the system, not (like Console7) going into the system. So PurestConsole2 gives you a sprinkling of treble glitter even while it rolls off the aliasing-prone frequencies more effectively.

The end result is the same kind of analog warmth… except it’s a cool, airy clarity that resolves absolutely EVERYTHING. If you’re shooting for super-clear this is the one you want. And since Console mixes can drive submixes which then use another Console system to sum the stems to the 2-buss… you can sneak it in on your harmony vocal beds, or orchestral stems, or you could use Console7 for everything and then sum only the stems to the 2-buss using PurestConsole2. Instead of mixing and matching within the summing busses, design your mix structure by figuring out where you want analog fatness and slam, and where you want clarity and resolution.

All this is supported by Patreon. I’m given to understand the guy I revisited Srsly for is happy, and I bet people are going to like next week’s reverb, and here’s a different style of super-good-sounding digital mix buss this week. I admit I have porting to the new M1 Macs to do, and now that I’ve cleared a bunch of this workload hopefully I can get on that as well. Remember it’s just me here, and I also have to shovel my own snow and carry my own firewood :) but, these days I can afford the firewood, and indeed the M1 Macbook Pro, and things are looking good. Hope you like PurestConsole2, those of you who’re Airwindows Console fans.

Date February 28, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 8 Comments

Srsly2

TL;DW: Srsly2 is a revisit of Srsly, to make the stereo widening more extreme.

Srsly2.zip(376k)

“You call that a wide? Now THIS is a wide!”

A little while ago, I put out a plugin that reverse engineered the famous Hughes SRS stereo widener, from pictures in an old Popular Mechanics article. By applying a set of narrow little EQ boosts and cuts to stereo, mid and side channels, you could make a sort of holographic effect. Srsly still exists, just as it was, for use tweaking out more natural stereo imagery.

But the rabbit hole goes a bit deeper than just that…

Srsly was by request of my friend Chad whose Hughes SRS wasn’t working properly, and who wanted a plugin version that didn’t hum. I didn’t have one of my own, so it was largely guesswork. Thing is, somewhere in there I got my hands on one (thanks Patreon! Between that and getting a real Mackie 1202 to play with, it turns out it’s useful for me to get actual gear relevant to my plugin interests, especially when I’m not getting the plugin right at first)

And before I used it myself, I didn’t really ‘get it’, but then I started putting it on reverb returns, and quickly got very fond of a certain ultra-wide reverb field.

And then I got more heavily into mixing in the box (and not with my hardware stuff) after Console7 came out… and discovered that my ITB reverbs did NOT do that kind of wide, and tried out my original Srsly… and had the same problem Chad ran into. It just didn’t do what the hardware box did. But I wasn’t done… so I started running stuff into the real hardware box, and just fooling around with the specific audio I’d begun to use, and rapidly worked out what was happening. My original Srsly left out a lot. It was more ‘audiophile’, more subtle, would fit in with more accurate recordings, but the real deal hardware device could be pushed WAY farther.

…in a way that I could interpret. And coding ensued…

Meet Srsly2. I’ve intentionally not tried super hard to exactly duplicate what is, after all, an unobtainable original hardware box by Howard Hughes’ company. Variations of this are still being licensed for use in car stereos and things, and I intentionally make no claim that I’m duplicating someone else’s property.

But. But. BUT. What I was asked for, was to accomplish a particular effect, where the stereo wideness could be made crazy exaggerated. And I was able to interpret what a real hardware box (not original, though) was doing. And I continued to modify Srsly until, with Srsly2, you can now dial it in to do very similar crazy and unreasonable things… and that’s probably close enough for a free and open source plugin modeling an ancient hardware device that can’t really be found anymore. You’ll find the controls ought to work as you’d expect them to, and you may find as I did that leaving the Center control alone and cranking up the Space control just right, can get you into a wild and somewhat boosted and hyped zone that makes the most of your spectacular stereo content, in much the same way the original, obscure, Hughes box did.

That’s my hope, anyhow. Hope you like it! I know I’ll be using it on stuff.

Date February 21, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Chris

Iron Oxide Classic 2

Verbity

PurestConsole2

Srsly2

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