Airwindows

Luxor

TL;DW: Luxor is a re-release of another old Character plugin.

Hoo boy! Welcome to my nightmare. I just tried to learn how to use a LUT on my camera in OBS and unleashed the whirlwind. Nearly six hours of struggle later, I have a plugin for you, and a video, kinda.

And a message. And I’m so wrecked that I’ll keep it really brief (also, it’s in the video, which might visually disintegrate but the audio ought to hold together)

Luxor is the Character plugin that’s based off Manley impulses. It does NOT sound like a Manley anything. Instead, it does a weird and maybe cool thing: you might treat it like an amp sim or something, see what you can get out of it. Cranking syn drums through it ought to be good. It is what it is, namely ‘a weird plugin not like anything else’ and I hope you like it.

That’s the plugin. The video finally got made, after hours of struggle with my gear and a whole false start (recorded a massive echo by leaving camera mic enabled), and I think it looks OK except it might disintegrate towards the end, as the encoder I used seems to have been a disaster (won’t do THAT again). So, what’s the message?

You know I use Patreon. But you might not know that I’ve had some people bail off it, or dial it back a lot, because of coronavirus troubles. There’s a lot going on right now. It might not be reasonable to expect to keep that sort of thing going, for a pile of free plugins.

So I’m overhauling the whole thing. Plugins are now $20 rather than $50. And I set up all new tiers, and hid the old ones, so you are encouraged to reconsider what you’re committing to my Patreon and if you were actually thinking of it as ‘this one plugin that is my secret weapon’, well, that is an open invitation to dial your Patreon WAY BACK. Take care of yourself. I will let you guys know if I am in trouble: for right now, I’m not. I can stand it. Re-adjust what you’re doing in light of the massive ‘price cut’ (for stuff that is free anyway) and look more after yourself for a while. I already saw a waver, a dip in the Patreon. I’m no longer going to be ‘almost top 50 worldwide in the Music category, on Patreon’. So be it. Let me show you what Airwindows is really about: I’ll keep working FOR you even while you can’t do anything for me, and I’ll tighten my belt and buy fewer synthesizer parts and we’ll both get through this! And we’ll look back on it and go, damn. Those were tough times.

I’m not joking. Cut back your patronage if for ANY REASON you need to take care of yourself. I am planning for a really major cut-back and will keep on working regardless. You’ll be back if we get through these tough times. Let me show you who I am.

Also, let me post this (including the possibly screwed-up video) and go have dinner ‘cos work did not let me rest for way too many hours.

Hope you like Luxor.

Date March 8, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

DigitalBlack

TL;DW: DigitalBlack is a quick, staccato gate.

DigitalBlack.zip(352k)

So here’s a gate. And here is why you should care :D

DigitalBlack is real simple on the surface: a threshold, and a dry/wet control. But what it does is more complicated. This isn’t a ‘gently fade to silence’ gate like SoftGate, or a ‘special effect’ like Gatelope. DigitalBlack was designed for one purpose: tightening up staccato direct-recorded tracks. I’m demonstrating it with a worst-case scenario because that’s all I had: I don’t get to do music, mostly, except for my live jams. But I had a drum room track where you can get some idea: play with it yourself if you’re curious, it’s free.

DigitalBlack does three things that are interesting, two of which are pretty unique. Firstly, it uses hysteresis to prevent ‘sputtering’. That’s pretty normal. Second, it fades not with a simple volume, instead it fades into negative Density (bulk of the sound attenuated, only the transients stick out) which has the effect of sounding like it’s fading backwards away from you, very quick. This gives it a physical motion not common to gates. And third, it tracks zero crossings in a special way so that the ‘silence’ time it has to traverse, before hitting the negative Density area and then true silence, is related to the bassiness of the content.

What this means is, if you’re hitting it with bassy content it’ll handle that gracefully. If you’ve got loads of midrange, it’ll gate that tighter. And if you’re making bright trebly sounds without a lot of bass, it’ll gate those FAST. And you can hear this on my lame demo, because in situations where only the initial spike of the drum hit got through on one side? (this is not linked: it’s designed so you could throw it on a submix with different stuff happening on L and R so it’s dual-mono) Even in my demo you can hear that some of those attacks are chopped off insanely fast. You’ll probably recognize pretty quickly if this is the gate for you. Try it on something like a DI guitar going into heavy ampsims, and see if you can’t get good results out of it. Put it on something like a kick or on individual drum mics (that you’re not already using Gatelope on), or on anything that needs to be insanely tight and quick to gate itself. It might be just what you needed. (for linked gentler slower gating to silence, try SoftGate: for a gate that also acts like envelope filters, use Gatelope)

This work is supported by Patreon. It took a bit of a down-swing when I was sick, but that’s natural: that’s the internet economy for ya. But I’m back in action, still appreciating the Patreon support, gonna be doing another Evergreens probably within a month for Patreons. (if you don’t see me that week, it might be the week for that: Patreon supporters will get a notice) I’m doing Q&A on Monday as usual, and music jam of some sort on Tuesday, and folks can log on and play Minecraft with me and chat on my Wednesday day-off stream.

Date March 1, 2020
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Apicolypse

TL;DW: Apicolypse is a re-release of my old API-style color adder, exactly as it was.

Apicolypse.zip(374k)

Feeling somewhat better, though I still have some recovering to do: at any rate, I’m back in the swing of things with plugins! This is Apicolypse, kin to Neverland: there will be others, but I’ve got a couple of things such as DigitalBlack and another Evergreens to do, so we’re not going all-Character all the time until they’re done. I will, however, persist with ’em :)

Apicolypse works the same way Neverland did. It’s a drop-in replacement for old mixes, and was a precursor to BussColors. It’s got a simpler method of generating its dynamic impulses, making them a sort of continuous spectrum between the low-level and high-level sounds. Like Neverland, it’s 44.1K though it will still function at any rate you like (sort of pitched up): like Neverland, it’s got a hardness control that at 0 is the ‘Density’ algorithm, at 1.0 is straight digital clipping at the extreme, and at any setting between is a sort of hybrid that turned out to not be the greatest: a switch from perfectly clean, to soft-clip at any desired transition point. Technically if you had it so it only kicked in on hot peaks, it’d be hard to find fault with it: I don’t recommend setting it (on this or any Character plug or ‘Crystal’) to a position where soft-clip kicks in at very low level. Either do Hardness at zero, or high enough that most of the audio stays ‘un-distorted’: you can do what you like, though, I’m not the boss of you :)

This work is supported by Patreon. It took a bit of a down-swing when I was sick, but that’s natural: that’s the internet economy for ya. But I’m back in action, still appreciating the Patreon support, gonna be doing another Evergreens probably within a month for Patreons (if you don’t see me that week, it might be the week for that: Patreon supporters will get a notice) and oh… one more thing.

Me and my brother Dan sat down for the first time today and began working on the secrets of VSTGUI: the old school stuff, that would be compatible with my intensely backward-compatible builds. He says it looks like sort of late-80s style C++, which is why it was so incomprehensible to me, and he doesn’t like that style (it’s doing multiple inheritance) but he CAN understand it. There’s not going to be immediate results from this so don’t get too hyped yet… but we took the first step, and I have a lot of clarity on exactly how I mean to do stuff. In VSTGUI, I mean. (We also did some game coding, but that’s another project entirely)

Talk to ya later: I’m doing Q&A on Monday as usual, and music jam of some sort on Tuesday, and folks can log on and play Minecraft with me and chat on my Wednesday day-off stream.

Date February 23, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Neverland

TL;DW: My old Neve emulation from 2007

Neverland.zip(373k)

I’m super sick today with a high fever, so I gotta keep this real short so I can go rest. (may or may not be showing up in livestreams Monday and Tuesday: thing about Tuesday is, technically I can just set my modular synth playing and let it run, since it’s got so much self-composing stuff in it now)

Neverland is my old Neve emulation from 2007. It’s out of the Character collection, and I’m re-releasing these in 64 bit and VST because there are people asking me to do that. If I make it exactly like how it was, you can open old mixes and retain the settings you had, so the Character plugins are kept exactly the same (though they do get denormalization fixes, and the dithering to 32 bit floating point where applicible).

Hope you like it. I’m going to go and rest :)

Date February 9, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 9 Comments

Chris

Luxor

DigitalBlack

Apicolypse

Neverland

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

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