Airwindows

VerbTiny

TL;DW: VerbTiny is a classic artificial reverb that expands reverb shape.

VerbTiny in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
VerbTiny.zip (569k) standalone(AU, VST2)

So, why this much simpler reverb? Instead of the more elaborate ones I’m developing starting with the letter k?

Because those ones (like kStation, kGuitarHall2 etc) are meant to simulate an acoustic space of various sorts. And that’s interesting, and usually what I want if I’m using reverb for things. And there’ll be more of those (for instance, kWoodRoom).

But VerbTiny’s made for different purposes. Rather than place sounds in a convincing acoustic environment, it’s about merging itself with sounds to alter their texture. I was listening to some old dub techno and noticed that the reverb was… naive. Much like in the 80s and 90s, I was hearing a lot of fake reverb run without any predelay or anything sophisticated, just the ‘tssshhhh’ of an early reverb device.

Then, experimenting with 4×4 matrices, I hit on one that was kind of special.

It was just another 4×4 matrix, but run through my testing, it made a sound that was weirdly intense with peak energy, beyond anything else I’d ever created. Just a lucky break (through spending days and weeks and months using genetic algorithm to evolve millions and billions of possible reverb matrices, so it’s not like it was only an accident). And that’s what’s in VerbTiny: that one algorithm for making a simple reverb.

Twice.

Because I’d had another idea: yes, it was gonna be ‘VerbTiny’ because it could sound good but the code would be way simpler than the main ones I’m developing. An example of super-low-CPU digital reverb, complete with my Bezier undersampling so it’d work on all sample rates, and also a Bezier filter so you could make it darker. But what if I ran another copy of it (since it’s so simple) and made that one dual-mono?

That would mean a wideness control, because it started out seeming kind of narrow (I can’t control this, it’s part of the algorithm). If there was a dual mono instance, each side would just feed back into the same side, meaning that stereo would stay as VERY wide stereo, at the cost of destroying the normal stereo image the reverb would have. And running two 4×4 reverbs isn’t that demanding.

And then, since the ‘normal’ stereo reverb was so narrow, that means it had a lot of energy in the mid channel even though it’s two stereo channels. So, what if the wideness went from ‘normal’ to the dual mono one at the center (0.5) and then as you went beyond that, you brought in the original reverb again, but with one channel phase flipped? Then it’d all be side channel energy, against the dual mono.

And so I did.

So most of this reverb acts normally (the regeneration control is a Galactic-style ‘replace’, the Derez and Filter controls are strictly ‘good sounding’ Bezier filtering, and the dry wet is as you’d expect). It’s designed to be largely an ‘old school’ reverb, and is in my Basic category in Consolidated because of how simple that is.

And then the Wider control is still easy, but contains subtleties. If you have it exactly at 0, 0.5, or 1, you’re wasting half the reverb (of course, you can do that if you want, I’m just saying). But adjust it, and listen to the shape of the ‘space’. You’ll find 0 is a normal stereo reverb, and then as you bring in the dual-mono version (set up so it blends nicely), the texture changes and becomes richer and it’s like turning up a ‘stereo wide’ control. At 0.5 you have a weird wideness effect done in reverb alone. It’s unnatural, but can be neat-sounding. And then as you continue to turn up Wider, you get into a HYPER-wide effect that also produces that richer tone, and it’ll really accentuate the stereo space like nothing I’ve made (short of the Srsly plugins, which you could put on the end of this just for overkill).

I’m looking at making one of these which is the opposite tone: dense, thick, and soupy, for adding body to the sound, rather than depth and spaciousness. This one is for artificial depth and space, but in a way that’s more retro and less realistic.

Hope you like it! Again, I would look for ‘blends’ of normal and dual-mono, either between 0 and 0.5, or between 0.5 and 1. That way you’re using both of the reverbs inside. But any way you use this is fine. I’m looking forward to playing with it myself once I’ve finished some more plugins, perhaps on my Bastl Kastle-based jams. It’s intentionally not like my other reverbs, but for some things it is just what I need :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
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 November 23, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Dynamics2

TL;DW: Dynamics2 is the compressor gate for new Console plugins!

Dynamics2 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Dynamics’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Dynamics2.zip (711k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Dynamics is the compressor/gate found in ConsoleX. Well, what’s new in compression between last year and this year? BeziComp is what. BeziComp is out, and is my Bezier curve stuff as applied to a compressor. The curve is simply tracking the loudness of the signal and using it as control points.

What’s that do? It constructs a compression curve that can react VERY quickly, but doesn’t follow the normal rules as far as such curves are concerned. It’s a gain change with no aliasing because it can never change gain faster than the speed of the curve: it can never get caught on the edges of a waveform and induce artifacts, because it’s generating a curve on the fly that can work up to high speed but never just abruptly change the gain causing a noise.

My plugins Surge and SurgeTide are a bit like this, and just as free of artifact, but they can’t compress in the normal sense, and this can… to some extent. You see, BeziComp is a little unpredictable. You can barely hear it until it’s doing crazy things, and it’s a striking compression style but not very familiar.

So, Dynamics2 adds something else… a whole separate compression routine, also BeziComp, that runs slower. The first compression is run by the Attack control, and you can turn that up to respond extremely fast, or slow it down until attacks are easy to here. Then, the second compression’s run by the Release control, and it’s always slower than Attack is, and spreads out the response a little. My hope is that it responds more like people need, while retaining the transparency and bounciness BeziCompe can provide.

And then, there’s the Gate control. Its release speed is shared with the compressor’s release speed, and it’s a bit sensitive: if it’s not kicking in, you might not have the release speed fast enough. The thing about it is, this is another Bezier-curve feature. So, it can snap off very quickly, but without providing a click on either gating or releasing gating.

I’ve got more elaborate gates in store (there’s this little thing called DeNoise that’s coming out) and it’s even possible this will see revision before new versions of Console come out, so this is a good place for feedback on whether this is working nicely for people. The whole engine runs on Bezier curves, so it has some characteristics that automatically beat its predecessor, Dynamics, but that’s not to say I can’t find ways to update it further.

But on a recent livestream, at the end of the day, I asked what people wanted the coming weekend. And I immediately heard back, Dynamics2! And so it is: this week’s plugin is a preview or prototype of what goes in ConsoleH, and in ConsoleX2.

AU versions contain an extra ‘Dynamics2Mono’ version, which is coded N to N, meaning it will run pure mono, but also unlinked stereo and any larger number of channels you like (all the AU plugins with ‘mono’ in the name do this).

Let me know how this works for you! There’s time to fuss with it a little more, before it’s 2026 and it gets built into Console systems!

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
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 November 16, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

ChimeyDeluxe

TL;DW: ChimeyDeluxe is a very flexible compressed DI conditioner.

ChimeyDeluxe in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Amp Sims’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
ChimeyDeluxe.zip (514k) standalone(AU, VST2)

I’ve been working on this one for a while. It’s done! ChimeyDeluxe is based on the same idea behind PointyDeluxe: more finely grained control over a bank of monster EQ bands, with processing stages between all the EQ stages that make the EQ so intense. None of it is normal but all of it is brutal, and PointyDeluxe found favor with industrial metal heads. To make it sound even slightly nice you have to follow it with either Cabs2, or an impulse response if you favor those, or perhaps the highpass and lowpass in ConsoleX2 or ConsoleH (the latter is still on track to be done before 2026).

Or you can just run it raw and demolish your mix.

I had to completely redesign the compression from ChimeyGuitar and it went through multiple revisions, ending up with 10 bands of EQ and sixteen (!) stages of EQ and compression. For a while there it ran compression from the Pressure algorithm, and then it went back to an upgraded BeziComp. You’re met with 10 bands of EQ, labeled like they are in PointyDeluxe (the Slipperman Distorted Guitar nomenclature for frequency ranges) and nothing else. The compression responds to both the largest boost and the deepest cut.

Much like with PointyDeluxe, this plugin does not protect you from yourself. Be gentle, or enjoy intensely gnarly resonant overloads. Why was this so important, if it’s just a strange noise maker delivering pungent resonances?

Because my target was to make the ultimate bass DI plugin, that could compress rather than distort, but also fill up the whole mix with dynamic bass intent. It needed to make notes just pop right out of the mix, and by the time I was done with it, it did. You can sculpt the string attack any way you like by how hard you drive it, and zero in on where in the mix you want this energy delivered. It’s the perfect Ted Templeman Trick plugin: you can just zero in on a hole in the kick drum EQ and supply not only frequency, but dynamics and bounciness.

It should also work just fine on guitars, keyboards, or whatever. Remember it’s trying to deliver amp-like voicings. I got it to make an absolutely brutal close-miked kick sound out of room mics just by obliterating the sound just right. It’ll always apply some compression, it’s just a matter of how hard you push it with its own EQ on top of that. And again, it doesn’t apply bandpassing or speaker emulation at all, so any sound out of ChimeyDeluxe will eat up a lot of mix space unless you do something to stop that.

Or, you can just let it push your mix around and make things huge: up to you!

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
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 November 9, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

SoftClock2

TL;DW: SoftClock2 is a groove-oriented time reference.

SoftClock2 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Utility’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
SoftClock2.zip (516k) standalone(AU, VST2)

SoftClock2, entrainment boogaloo!

You might or might not have heard of the first SoftClock. It came out shortly after I’d developed it because people desperately wanted to play with it, and before I was able to use it much. (still can’t, too busy with plugins.) It’s the metronome made of waving, wobbling tones where the beat is always a swoop of a (mostly) sine wave that goes up to a high point. Inspired by a joke metronome of dog woofs that proved strangely inspiring to play along to, SoftClock is the machine tempo with perfect regularity but no actual beat, where you have to place the ‘click’ of your notes wherever it SEEMS to be.

Turns out there are some refinements to be made with SoftClock2. None of them involve ever specifying exactly where a click really is, or letting it sync with a DAW grid. The click is ONLY where you think it to be, and at its best the click is a shape in time defined by your riffs, a terrific way to swing along with really grooving time or dramatic flourishes. It’s the anti-machine rhythm.

This is because SoftClock2 swings along with the ‘entrainment’ of your limbs and musical gestures. Generally you don’t play music in sudden microsecond-long bursts of your arms or fingers. You have to swing your arm or lean into a kick or, if you’re Les Claypool, stomp your foot along to the beat to get yourself moving to the music. The weight of your motion helps you to keep things steady.

SoftClock2 gives an audio picture of that motion, not of any specific point where the note hits. That makes it a lot more friendly and encouraging to play along to than a traditional click.

And this, you’ll need, if you take advantage of SoftClock2’s capacity for strange grooves and polyrhythms. Here’s where one of the updates is found: on at least the generic VST version of the plugin, the ‘Count’ control tells you not only which beat it’s doing, but after that, the time signature. Many times that’s predictable, like a 5 or a 7 or a 4/4. But then you have many variations on 11, 13, 17, 19, 23… just a wide gamut of freaky proggy things to count. The count always works like this: the nonaccented notes start high with the One, swing down to halfway, and then ramp up again to the One. The accents follow patterns: if you want to interpret the count differently (or just have a steady pulse) that’s fine, but it’s meant to give you subdivisions, typically repeated long subdivisions ending with a short one. For instance, all the 19s are counted that way, like going 5-5-5-4 because the idea is a good weird groove sets up patterns you can track, and a departure at the end. So, SoftClock2 was always designed to do that.

There’s a change, though. The original had a ‘BigBeat’ control and a Swing control. Swing hesitated alternate beats up to and beyond doing a triplet shuffle feel, and BigBeat always took the ‘valley’ and treated it as the snare hit, which you could hesitate to make a weightier backbeat or a pocket backbeat. Doesn’t take much.

The trouble is, people kept hearing the peak as the snare backbeat.

So, SoftClock2 simply lets you decide. This is most relevant to simpler beats, and the weird crazy time signatures may still sound best with the beats ramping up to the One. But if you’re just doing a 4 or an 8, or need to reverse the feel of something, or you’re doing a reggae where the One is the valley but you need it to hit well behind the beat to groove properly… increase the Valley control instead, and now that accent is slowed. Or, if you’re using a simple beat but you hear it ramping up to the snare hit, increase the Peak control and it gets more weight and swing behind it. You can sync it with settings of Swing too, or even construct perfectly steady but wonky grooves this way.

If you’re using an AU version, or a DAW where it’s not constantly redrawing the plugin labelling, or if you’re using Consolidated and it doesn’t update what’s next to Count quickly enough, I found that closing and opening the plugin interface does seem to update what’s shown to the current setting. It’s just that some DAWs live-draw this label constantly, and others cache it and stop recalculating it. I can’t control that part, but you can get a reference to what you did with a little extra trouble. Count it, it should be doing spaced accents with a departure right at the end to give you the funny time. You, too, can do 17s and 19s that are actually catchy, if you make ’em out of sub-riffs in this way.

And then if you want to be really annoying you can lay down SoftClock with whatever you’re doing, and what if you’d like to overdub a complete departure? Like you’re in 4/4 but you’d like to put down part of the riff where it’s 7 notes in the space of 4?

Cheat. Start with Tuple in 4 to lay down the main riff, and then elsewhere in the arrange window, do a separate pass with Tuple set to 7. It’ll be quite a bit faster. Groove whatever you want to that, get a good snippet, and then fly that over to the middle of your 4 groove… and it will line up perfectly with the notes you did in 4, because Tuple is just as accurate in 7 as it is in 4. It’ll do the math for you, so you can construct all sorts of peculiar things but make them groove like anything.

Play with it, have fun. There’s no wrong way to use this, and you don’t have to make it over-fancy. It’s just able to scale up to the most unreasonable things and make them seem like you have amazing powers of odd-time-having. The best part is, you do it all playing live to the wobbling tone in SoftClock, so it won’t seem artificial. Just kind of alien :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
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 November 2, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

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