Airwindows

Srsly

TL;DW: Srsly is a psychoacoustic stereo processor.

People get really excited sometimes, so here’s a failure :)

Srsly is meant to do what a Hughes SRS processor does. That’s an obscure stereo widener actually made by Howard “Spruce Goose” Hughes’ company. I tackled it because a musician I love, Chad Clark, needs one ‘cos his is broken and not in proper working order. Hence, the need for somebody to try and do a plugin version. So I tried, with some pictures out of Popular Mechanics and a single cruddy youtube video to be my guide (this thing is OBSCURE) and I have not succeeded. Whatever the real one sounds like, this ain’t it.

But it does a thing, and I’ve added a Q control to help get it to do useful things since I can’t tell what’s right or wrong for this stuff, and this is as far as I can carry it right now. The source is MIT licensed for anyone else who’d like to pick up where I left off, and quite a bit of basic information is shown in the curves of that Popular Mechanics article about the thing, and it is kinda neat: accentuate comb-filtery effects you get from the shapes of your own ears. It does do a thing, that’s not like any other stereo effect I know of. And I ought to be able to use some of the tech from this to do subtle stereo-field enhancements in future versions of Console, stuff like that. You can refine it down to basic concepts and apply those.

Also, you can hear a sneak peek of my alternate Chord Organ firmware (which is actually on my github if anyone wants to play with it, though I’m not ready to call it done this week).

If you’d like to give me anything to celebrate us all getting to a new year, there’s always Patreon. It might not seem like it’s doing me a favor this week as I’m so obviously fried, but I’m cutting back to the plugins and the Monday Q&A. I even talked to a customer on the phone for quite some time when I got too frustrated with the Chord Organ firmware. I will have to show more respect for my own health and well-being, but it seems like my muse wants to make the point that I’ve got lots more in store for 2020: hours I spent, convincing modular synths to play those weird chord progressions and lead lines. The thing is, it took hours of debugging and reflashing the Teensies, but I did not make up those chords. Not even a computer did. The synth made them up, as it went, from a sort of random generator called a Turing Machine. (the thing I like best about this whole project is, you can make it all out of DIY kits…)

Anyway, here’s srsly.

Date January 5, 2020
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

Baxandall

TL;DW: Baxandall is a killer general-purpose EQ.

Baxandall.zip(369k)

This was going to be next week, but Compresaturator2 was broken. Sooooo… we’re gonna skip ahead and do THE killer EQ of 2020, before 2020 is actually here!

Baxandall is a configuration of analog parts for making a flexible and great-sounding EQ, noted for very gentle musical slopes. It’s said that in digital, Baxandall is nothing more than a type of Q, much like Butterworth, and every one is like every other one.

And that would be nonsense, because this is Airwindows Baxandall, and it wipes the floor with other things bearing this name, because it does lots of weird and wonderful things under the hood that make it quantitatively different. And people can do as good as this… by taking the open source code under the MIT license and crediting me. I don’t believe anyone can get close using ordinary filter-designer textbook stuff, no matter how they dress it up or what distortions they add to be ‘analog’. (Airwindows Baxandall doesn’t distort.)

Baxandall starts with a two-band filter that, zeroed out, subtracts an inverse lowpass from a lowpass and gives you bit-identical, perfectly transparent sound. That’s if you’re being subtle. If you boost or cut, lows or highs, it gives you the gentle broad boosts you expect, centered on the vital midrange. As you get more intense with the boosting, it gets more extreme, to where if you’re doing double boosts to get an intense exaggerated sound, a mids notch will naturally develop to accentuate the boosting. The whole voicing shifts to accomodate what you want to do with it, and you can play bass against treble or vice versa to get really wild voicings, such as for extreme EQ treatments (in terms of lows or highs)… but using the same natural Airwindows Baxandall tonality, so it won’t sound ‘filtery’, it’ll sound like it was meant to be that way.

Airwindows Baxandall uses my interleaved biquad filters (original, purest form, not meant for rapid automation) that run inside a Console5 instance to deepen the sound of the filter. It is truly unlike any other digital filter, ‘Baxandall’ or otherwise. It’ll be one of the first picks for when I start putting together curated lists of ‘use these ones’ plugins, one of the first things I’ll grab for if I’m livestreaming ITB mixing to show people how I’d approach that, one of the most important plugins in the whole collection.

You can have it. Merry Xmas and happy any and all other holidays.

If you’d like to give me anything to celebrate us all getting to a new year, there’s always Patreon. I hope you like Baxandall as much as I do :)

Date December 29, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 16 Comments

BiquadOneHalf

TL;DW: BiquadOneHalf is an interleaved biquad filter like Biquad.

BiquadOneHalf.zip(368k)

Hi folks! Disregard this one. Unless you like basic tech demos and REALLY subtle subtleties. And the video demo didn’t come out, and it’s too late to do it over… time to rest up so future, better, more exciting plugins can get posted properly and well.

BiquadOneHalf is tech that’s going into my future plugins. You have to set the frequency twice as high as you would using Biquad, and it can only go up to 1/4 Nyquist, but the way it interacts with the sampling frequency is special and works very well for some types of filtering. You’ll be getting more developed plugins of that nature soon, and all through January, but for now I got this: working version of the new Biquad filter variation, that you can use on stuff.

It’s the first version, not the ‘sweepable’ version, because this is going to find its way into fixed-frequency EQs, ‘head bump’ etc… compare it to Biquad remembering to use twice the frequency you otherwise would. It’s happiest on bass or midrange: much like regular Biquad, trying to force it to get real close to its high frequency limit can get messy.

Patreon now gets you an extra minute of livestream every time the amount goes up enough (that’s pretty fine granularity). See ya Monday, where we’ll figure out what day the ‘listen to people’s music onstream’ will be. Have fun with BiquadOneHalf. Don’t bump this thread, I’m sure holiday sales from other folks are much more important and anyway the plugin video is derped and the loudness is totally not loud enough (I changed it on a stream and then didn’t spot that I needed to put it back). weee! Merry merry. Talk to ya later.

Date December 22, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Coils

TL;DW: Coils models the types of distortion you’ll find in transformers.

Coils.zip(357k)

OK, I think this worked. Apologies for being fried and stressed: I was operating under time pressure (four HOURS driving today, doing stuff) and was halfway through making a video when I worked out there was a serious bug in the plugin. After a frantic bugfix, I did another video that was even more frazzled, only to discover I wasn’t even wearing my lavalier mic. So, by the time I made the video you see, I pretty much had no effs left to give, and after a busy day, I’ve completed the updating and here’s the plugin. Love ya, and usually it’s easier than this :)

Coils is like the inverse of Focus. Instead of boosting/distorting UP the mids, it saturates DOWN the extreme highs and lows leaving the mids untouched. Because it’s a fixed mid shape mimicking the Neve transformer picture I was shown, the biquad doesn’t have to run inside Console as it’s not a high-Q filter at all (you’ll notice way more of an effect on steep filters) so it trades off that effect for less processing. The saturation is the Density algorithm, but without clipping, so if you trash it you get wrap-around on the transfer function curve, which works out to be kinda transformery.

Apologies. I am too tired to translate. Listen to the plugin. If anything is broken, tell me right away, tomorrow ;)

The top control increasingly distorts (still kinda subtle), the middle one DC biases the core (second harmonics!) which does more when you’re less saturated, and then there’s a dry/wet. Enjoy :)

Oh yeah, Patreon. Almost forgot.

Date December 15, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Chris

Srsly

Baxandall

BiquadOneHalf

Coils

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

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