Airwindows

BrassRider

TL;DW: BrassRider is One Weird Trick for drum overheads in metal!

So this is pretty simple, and pretty distinctive. I made it for my friend Tim (one day I’ll repost his amazing rant, on the brink of his possible death, to musicians about ‘stop buying DAWs! Stop buying mic pres and plugins and becoming sound engineers! Learn to play your instrument!’) and it’s possible it has only one user, Tim. If so, it’s okay. This is a weird trick, a very specialized little toy. I do think it’s good at its strange purpose, though.

BrassRider is a drum overhead rider for metal mixers.

Here’s the situation. If you are doing a metal mix of extreme brutality, you are probably making very intense, sculpted spot-mic sounds. You probably have a mic on every tom, every drum, perhaps also on key cymbals. And you probably have overheads, because hey, overheads. Drums use overheads, right?

And your overheads probably aren’t helping you AT ALL. You’re getting ‘jazz drummer’, ‘classic rock’ snare and tom sounds poking through from the overheads, and you hate them. Yet, there are some cymbal crashes that should get into the mix. What to do?

BrassRider does one thing (one weird trick!) to help you. It watches for crashes (noise like white noise) and it cranks the volume WAY up when that goes beyond a threshold. You turn up the threshold control to start engaging this behavior. There’s a dry wet control that you might not even use if your mixes are truly brutal and heavy (who needs reality?)

So then, BrassRider is cranking your overheads when the crashes are hit. So what you do is you bury the overhead mics in the mix, completely. And you use BrassRider to make them peek out only when there has to be a decent hint of crash cymbal in there. And most of the time, BrassRider totally kills the overheads so your drum sounds have maximum sculpted brutality and work the way you want them.

I don’t sit around making metal mixes so I can’t demo this properly, and I made it so I’m not that concerned with doing the ultimate demo for people who don’t know what they’re doing and have to be sold on the tool. Tim would be disgusted with me if I went around trying to popularize this one and teach noobs how to use it. So, if all that confused you, this is not the plugin for you. Also, I’m not going to teach you how to use it in a metal mix (except maybe on Monday livestreams. ;) ) And if you know exactly what I’m talking about and you’re already dialing it in, a wild mad light in your eyes, well… you’re welcome :)

If this becomes indispensable to you, please jump on my Patreon for an additional $50 a year if you’d have paid that for this unusual tool, and if you can do things like that. If you can’t afford it, use the plugin anyway, and maybe one day you’ll be better off :)

Date April 7, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

Highpass2

TL;DW: Highpass2 is an unusual-sounding variable-slope highpass filter.

Highpass2.zip(351k)

Much like Lowpass2… and yet, not entirely :)

So, the way the interleaved IIR filters act in Highpass is like this: the harder you filter, the more the filter rolls off the very highest frequencies. That’s because it’s like the inverse of Lowpass2. It’s got the same four poles, the same type of tone doctoring (in this case, loose and tight for what bass remains) but the way to use it might be distinct.

I think it works well for getting a subsonic roll-off (perhaps with the four poles of filtering, like a mini ToVinyl highpass) and then using the Loose option to let the bass move a little more. I found it more difficult to distinguish what the funny-named slider was doing, but it’s still intense on high settings. And it’s great for trapping in high percussion because of the clarity of the passband and the way it rolls off over 20K (or higher, if you’re at higher sample rates).

And of course, like Lowpass2, this is here to fix the limitations of the original Highpass on those very same sample rates, going from no filtering to total filtering.

If this becomes indispensable to you, please jump on my Patreon for an additional $50 a year if you’d have paid that for this unusual tool (perpetual license, forever support, all your computers, you get the source code: you know, normal terms and conditions like that). If you can’t afford it, use the plugin anyway, and maybe one day you’ll be better off :) if you just hate Patreon, I’m working on getting some alternate things in place such as Ko-fi. However, in order to set up Ko-fi to be even comparable to what Patreon does, I have to pay them up front. So please help with the Patreon so I can afford to have a fallback position. Probably won’t ever matter, Patreon is thriving and it is only investor logic that has anyone thinking it isn’t :)

Date March 31, 2019
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Lowpass2

TL;DW: Lowpass2 is an unusual-sounding variable-slope lowpass filter.

Lowpass2.zip(353k)

This new version of Lowpass exists to fix a bug, but then I added stuff to it that makes it entirely a new animal!

The existing Lowpass tries to produce the same cutoff no matter what sample rate you use, but doing that meant high sample rates can never use a fully opened filter. Instead, you got roll-off no matter what. Lowpass2 no longer does that: the filter control goes from complete silence to wide open no matter what sample rate you’re at.

But there’s more: Lowpass2 still uses the interleaved IIR filters the original Lowpass pioneered (you’ll notice subtle bleed-through of information near the Nyquist frequency, beyond human hearing, but also the open and involving sound) but now it can use from zero to four poles of filter: so you get a stronger effect, and a sharper roll-off!

And that’s important because with four poles of filter you REALLY hear what the Soft/Hard slider does. This interacts with the filter control (don’t expect the cutoff frequency to stay the same) but what it does is vary the cutoff based on what sample value the input is. So you can either roll off harder for the peaks of the sound… or let ’em through more. Since it’s an IIR filter the effect is gradual, but at four poles it’s really noticeable.

That gives you two distinct tone colors for your lowpassing, plus special effects: in the video I demonstrate how cranking the control to Hard on pink noise can make it sound like wind noise where you’re going incredibly fast. Lowpass2 is ideal for experimental tone shaping, and for sound design.

If this becomes indispensable to you, please jump on my Patreon for an additional $50 a year if you’d have paid that for this unusual tool (perpetual license, forever support, all your computers, you get the source code: you know, normal terms and conditions like that). If you can’t afford it, use the plugin anyway, and maybe one day you’ll be better off :) if you just hate Patreon, I’m working on getting some alternate things in place such as Ko-fi. However, in order to set up Ko-fi to be even comparable to what Patreon does, I have to pay them up front. So please help with the Patreon so I can afford to have a fallback position. Probably won’t ever matter, Patreon is thriving and it is only investor logic that has anyone thinking it isn’t :)

Date March 24, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Compresaturator

TL;DW: Compresaturator fades between compressing and soft clipping.

Compresaturator.zip(357k)

This is eagerly anticipated. For some, it needs no introduction.

For everyone else: one of the final plugins from the Kagi era, this stopped being available for a while when Kagi went out of business. It’s like a soft-saturator in which you can dial in even more cleanness, but couple it with a weird springy quality that’s very dynamic. It occupies more of the role of a stem or buss compressor than a peak limiter, but makes for a very powerful loudenator. The idea is that you can get a loud punchy sound but with more attitude than usual.

Since it’s one of those strange Airwindows algorithms, be aware you can push it too far and get it to ‘flutter’ or oscillate like a tremolo or do other odd things: in normal use that shouldn’t ever be a concern, I’m just saying that this plugin isn’t normal and doesn’t sound or act quite like other plugins.

In other words, classic Airwindows :) hope you like it!

Patreon is the reason I can do this. I’ve got a couple new Patreon goals beyond simply putting out amazing plugins every week: since people are used to that, apparently I have to do more, and I’ve come up with something good. If I reach $1500 a month total, I’ll do a third livestream every week and deconstruct/analyse a classic hit record from its high-dynamics original vinyl version. You won’t hear the whole record but I’m going to try to play a minute of the audio, the same minute I analyse with special Airwindows tools that aren’t even in plugin form. Since it’s a livestream, you can probably hear it too: whether it’s retained on the channel depends on which record company owns it and how they handle ContentID (it is absolutely fair use, but nobody cares about that). So you might need to tune in, to get the full experience. Then at $2000 a month, if I get there, I’ll be doing the same thing for the music of patrons giving $50 a year and up, and then it becomes more of a production workshop. We’ll see how these things develop, but it gives me something MORE to offer beyond all I’m doing already :)

Date March 17, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Chris

BrassRider

Highpass2

Lowpass2

Compresaturator

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