Airwindows

VoiceTrick

TL;DW: VoiceTrick lets you record vocals while monitoring over speakers.

Record your vocals without headphones with This One Weird Trick! :D

…

No, really, that’s actually the idea. I have to explain the trick or the plugin will make no sense at all, but if you know what to do you can record vocals with monitor speakers or open-ear headphones and get great results. Here we go.

VoiceTrick isn’t meant to be heard by end listeners and doesn’t do anything useful for the sound. Instead, it exploits some quirks of microphones and the human ear to make it so you can put up a mic, blast your backing tracks, and record (mostly) just the vocals and not so much the backing tracks coming out of the speakers. It’s fiddly to do if you want really impressive results, but there are lots of benefits: most of all, allowing singers to hear themselves as if they were singing a capella, because they literally get to ditch the headphones if they like.

What it does (it’s a stereo plugin, for the monitor mix) is make the mix into mono, filter it (if you like) and then flip phase on one side.

What YOU do is, place your vocal mic EXACTLY between the two speakers, perfect mirror image, pointed away from the speakers and towards the vocalist. The closer you can get to a perfect mirror image the better your results will be: if the bounce off the back wall is still a perfect mirror image, that’ll cancel too. Eventually you’ll get into a room reverb off the speakers, but that’s probably OK, and if you need that room reverb to be darker, that’s what the EQ is for. It’s the lowpass from Airwindows Capacitor. You’ll have NO vocal in the monitors at all, it’s all acoustic volume from the singer. If you take some time and effort to set up the perfect cancellation (Peter Gabriel would take days to do this) you might want to use a heavy sturdy stand that really locks the mic in one position. If you’ve got that perfect, you can sing into the mic and crank it WAY up in the mix without issues, or compress it. If the mic is off-center, you’ll hear a flangey hint of the backing tracks.

Another thing you can do is use open-ear headphones the same way. With those, it’s even more likely that the earpieces will move relative to the mic (which still should be exactly centered) and you’ll hear more of the flangey quality. That’s literally what’s happening: it’s like a through-zero flange at the mic position. Your ears will hear more than the mic does, because they reconstruct the sound field in stereo and the mic can only hear what’s exactly at its point of sound collection. If the earpieces move, they won’t be as loud as speakers but they’re much closer to the microphone. On the other hand, they’re closer to each other, so they’ll always cancel a lot of bass and low midrange no matter how off-axis they get. If the flangey stuff is bothersome, use the EQ to roll off the extreme highs until you can live with the results. Pretty simple.

This is all the more important in the age of DAWs, because if you’re monitoring through a DAW (especially if you’re tracking through plugins or into a big dense mix) you might be dealing with a lot of latency. Latency in vocal monitoring can completely obliterate your ability to sing or even talk, and the better a singer or performer you are, the worse it will hurt you. VoiceTrick lets you go back to a capella, where there’s no latency or even headphones to interfere with your performance.

This One Weird (Voice)Trick is free. It’s real simple, it’s a convenience plugin. Please don’t master through it or everyone will be sad :) if you’d like to support my ability to do this and more, please jump on my Patreon as that is why you still have me here doing this a couple years later. I’ll scale this operation up as much as I can: that depends on you, and I suppose internet virality. In the complete absence of internet virality, I’m happy to say I’m still here and able to give you the proverbial One Weird Trick for vocal tracking. Hope it makes your life better. :)

Date May 12, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

ResEQ

TL;DW: ResEQ is a bank of mostly midrange resonances.

ResEQ.zip(378k)

Sometimes I’m just contrarian, and sometimes it’s for a reason.

I keep getting asked to make a ‘Soothe’ plugin. I get that: it’s hyped, it lets you make stuff louder, my plugins are free and open source, why not etc etc. I understand why I’m getting asked to do that.

However, I’m here to explain why this week’s Airwindows plugin is an OPPOSITE ‘Soothe’, and why you would want to do the opposite of Soothe (a sophisticated and very busy plugin that scans for resonant peaks and whacks just the frequencies that are resonating the hardest).

ResEQ is literally the farthest from that you can get. It’s a bit like the filter banks on an old Polymoog. You set up frequencies (as many as eight, in parallel) and hear ONLY what those tight resonances let through. It’ll kill other sounds as much as 90 or 100 dB down, nuke them completely beyond hearing. Far from evening out the tapestry of the sound and removing frequencies that poke out, it turns the WHOLE track into just beams of narrowly defined frequency.

You can do this with light, too. I think Polaroid experimented with this. You can reconstruct a full-color image from several bands of tightly resonant color, because of how the eye interprets them. The same is true for the ear. Given enough distinct bands of super-resonant audio you get a kind of facsimile of the original sound, and it begins to sound like an insane, ultra-resonant fullrange sound, just completely weirded out. (if you try to put this on a mix buss you have only yourself to blame)

So… WHY?!?

Because if you do that on a track in your mix, all the other tracks can speak clearly past the weird ResEQ one. It remains super-audible but completely gets out of the way. This is not really what you’d put on a front-and-center track, a lead vocal, an orchestra stem. Nope. You’d put this on the third set of guitar overdubs (the thickener!), on that background synth, on the horn buried in the back of the mix, on that extra drums overdub that’s a little wacky. ResEQ goes on the colorful elements, the stuff that should have BIG COLOR but not get in the way. How do you get some quirky element or extra thing to jump way out without getting in the way? Set up ResEQ on it, voice it so it’s covering the range you want. Tweak it until it has the right vibe (you can isolate or remove really narrow sound characteristics, truly transform a recording with it) and then sit it back or let it jump up front and slap peoples’ ears. Either way, that track will make its presence known, bigtime, whether it’s quiet or loud. It’s all about the mids, high or low: if you need super high or super low, you’ll be using something else. Mids are where mojo lives.

It’s got a dry/wet control, too. So you COULD use it sort of like a normal EQ. But why would you do that when you can reconstruct an ear-grabbing caricature of the sound, with tons of character and mojo, AND have that sound sit easily in the mix making space for everything else?

If you would buy this for $50 (perpetual license, lifetime support, plus you get source code) then jump on my Patreon and support this project as if it was demanding your money. Unless you don’t have any. In which case use it anyway, and here’s hoping you make $50 (or $12, or $1, or anything really). I’ll trust ya. Besides, if I get to $1500 a month (which is a pretty comfortable livelihood in Vermont if you live frugally) I will add a third livestream: 11 AM EST is when I stream, Mondays is Q&A and Tuesdays is an electronic music jam, both for two hours. I’ll add Wednesday and discuss evergreen classic albums, how they were engineered and recorded, how they’re mixed, and I’ll play some of the original vinyl and show charts of how those recordings work. So, we’re not that far from doing that. If I do reach that goal, be sure to tune in because some of the streams may not stick around on YouTube after doing them! Depends on whether the fair use and scholarly analysis impresses rights-holders. That will be on a case by case basis, so those future Wednesday Evergreen streams might not be there to return to, and I won’t be keeping my own copies: you snooze, you lose! We will see how that stuff turns out… when I reach that goal. (I think some of them will be allowed to stay)

Date May 5, 2019
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

curve

tl;dw: curve is the simplest, purest form of airwindows recurve with no extra boosts.

curve.zip(463k)

sometimes you just want the effect to be lowercase.

the previous plugin slammed home with 6 db of gain in its compression so you could hear it working, and had a clipper on the end in case you wanted to use it as a loudenator.

but maybe you don’t. maybe the best thing for the purest, subtlest compression (the one with no transition point between getting louder and getting quieter, and no edges in the sound anywhere) is to have no gain either. it can still catch overs… most of the time, occasionally not. it can still be heard, probably, but in this form it can sit on nearly any track, unnoticed, quietly balancing levels in lowercase.

you could put it on everything, even though compression multiplies (you get the ratio of all the different compressions, times each other). curve is so calm and gentle that even putting it on all tracks and stems and then the 2-buss still shouldn’t give you a heavily compressed sound.

people have asked whether you can still do airwindows patreon for one dollar a month rather than the ‘fifty dollars a year’ concept. the answer is yes, of course, the per-plugin concept is just to give people something they can relate to. also if you can only spare one dollar a month i would rather help you. but hey, if you gotta share the love i cannot argue as it would be most hypocritical given my own fierce affections for the music producing community.

i was helping clean up my late dad’s house and got a book called archy and mehitabel. whether it influenced curve will have to remain a mystery to the non-literary. suffice to say there’s a dance in the old plugin-monger yet. whatthehell, whatthehell

do 2s and 3s count as uppercase

enjoy curve

Date April 29, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Recurve

TL;DW: Recurve is a special buss compressor with no threshold point.

Recurve.zip(342k)

Sometimes the most amazing things are the simplest.

Recurve is ONE line of code (per channel) plus a bit of implementation. It’s a compressor, and this ‘preview’ look at it is a lot like when Spiral came out: this is Recurve as a ‘black box’, set up for maximum explosiveness and impressiveness. (I’ve got more elegant plugins in the works and this will become a core technique due to its effectiveness and simplicity of coding, so this is the introduction to what the algorithm does)

Recurve works on principles similar to Spiral. It’s using a very high resolution sine calculation to affect the sound, and scales part of itself relative to the loudness of the sample it’s on. It also enjoys similar principles of ‘no sharp transitions, ever, for internal calculations’. In a clipper that means the rate of curvature doesn’t abruptly change, which is the principle behind Spiral. For Recurve, this is applied to the threshold of a compression and whether gain is being turned up or down.

If the signal is super-quiet, the gain doesn’t change. Recurve takes moments of space and ambience between loud sounds, and preserves their character. It doesn’t swoop up in volume: if you need sidechainy pumping, you have to use something else.

If the signal is medium, the gain gets turned up until it hits its max (with Recurve, it’ll exactly double the gain, which is BitShiftGain at its smallest increment. Exactly 6dB of very clean gain boosting things. This isn’t at a threshold: it’s at the most intense spot of a sine curve, so as a waveform passes through this zone it’ll increment the gain smoothly and without any transition points.

If the signal is loud enough, it pushes this curve back through zero to its most negative point, and the sine function delivers a -1, for the maximum gain-cut, which is also scaled by how loud the sample is. So Recurve can cut back an over-loud transient FAST. In fact everything it does is really fast because the lack of transition points and the gradual nature of this sine-triggering lets it react very efficiently without edginess. It also lets through sonority and projection but cuts dull and muted stuff, kind of like Pyewacket, but without Pyewacket’s inherent pointyness.

Sounds complicated? Just listen to stuff and switch it on. This is a preview in extra-dramatic form of an algorithm that’s going to find many uses in Airwindows plugins. It’s the compression equivalent of Spiral for saturation, and it could be adapted in many ways.

The way you get today is a buss-comp or limiter form, running in true (linked) stereo. Mix into it and Recurve will gracefully eat up whatever you send it, even if you push it real hard. There’s a built-in 6dB of very clean boost to show off what it can do, and there’s a clipper on the output in case you get carried away and want to slam it so hard that transient attacks might poke out. And because of Recurve’s curve-and-recurve gain adjustment style, you’ll get none of the usual compression pumping and breathing: it’s just plain different. I hope you like it. There will be more :)

The Airwindows Patreon is how you have this. Turns out keeping Chris working on plugins has benefits: who knew? If you agree, join and help me hang in there, ‘cos in a very real sense we’re all in this together. I’m quite happy to set you up with the plugins first, and we’ll see where that takes us. So far so good :)

Date April 21, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

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VoiceTrick

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