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Chris

Chris

Hi! I've got a new plugin you can have! These plugins come in Mac AU, and Mac, Windows and Linux VST. They are state of the art sound, have no DRM, and have totally minimal generic interface so you focus on your sounds.

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.

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.

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.

HipCrush

TL;DW: HipCrush is the de-rez section for ConsoleH.

HipCrush in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Lo-Fi’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
HipCrush.zip (528k) standalone(AU, VST2)

So when I said I needed to write transformative plugins in order to give ConsoleH a true ability to invent new sounds and genres, this is what I meant.

Is it de-rez, bit-crush, sampler emulations? Yes and no. In particular, it’s very very bitcrush, but in a way you’ve certainly not heard before. But to start explaining, I need to talk about another plugin I did once, ResEQ. That was among my first plugins, and it generated multiple resonant peaks and added them to a convolution kernel in order to make a tone entirely out of multiple really tight resonances.

HipCrush begins as a replacement for what, in ConsoleX, is an SSL-like four-band parametric. The ConsoleX one even uses nonlinearity to emulate real-world capacitors in order to bring a more ratty old SSL vibe to its boosts and cuts, all pretty tight and raunchy-sounding. All good fun. That’s not what HipCrush is about at all.

Instead, it’s not boosts and cuts. You pick three boosts (in ConsoleH it will be four) and the lowest setting isn’t a cut, it’s silence. With all the levels at zero, it makes no sound (unless you’re using the dry/wet). As you bring up the gains, the boosts start pretty broad, and get tighter and more intense as they go. With all three (or four in ConsoleH) bands in play, the level is roughly the same across various settings, but the original tone is completely replaced by pungent, resonant wah-like effects.

This is already useful in its way. If you reconstruct a tone so it more or less covers the frequencies you need, it’ll have a similar vibe to the dry signal but will be WAY more clear in the mix. You’re doing an opposite-Soothe: you’re replacing the whole sound with vivid resonant tones like cocked wahs, several at once, and this is incredible at clearing up a mix. HipCrush always does this unless you use the dry/wet (in ConsoleH, you’ll crossfade between this and a simple three-band great-sounding EQ, SmoothEQ3, which is also coming soon).

You can layer tracks using HipCrush just as a three-peak resonant filter, balance the frequency ranges and find areas of power to reinforce, and get a really intense mix where your layering tracks refuse to get in the way of full-range tracks because they’re doing that ResEQ thing.

But then it gets REALLY transformative, as in ‘use Eagles songs as your backing rhythms, why not, they’ll be unrecognizable’ transformative.

The remaining control for each band is called Crush. Like some of my recent reverb controls, at the center it’s disabled and isn’t crushing anything (if it’s perfectly centered at 0.5 all crush is bypassed and your filters are full double precision floating point) but if you turn it clockwise (to the right) it’s Compress and counterclockwise, to the left, it’s Gate.

It doesn’t really compress, or gate. That’s just what you get to do with the bitcrush, in a continuous adjustment from 16 bit right down to one bit or less.

What does that mean? Turn up the control for the ‘compress’ and you progressively bitcrush with the transition between bits located exactly at 0.0. Unless your actual signal is DC-offset, what this will do is bring up a bitcrush ‘noise floor’ that roars and screams and is a blast of noise. (In ConsoleH, you’ll have a gate in the dynamics section that can turn it into gated roar, as it’ll trigger off the signal before the effect hits).

If you turn the control down from 0.5, you bring up the same noisefloor, but offset exactly half a bit. That means that where the roaring out of control version becomes full blast, that’s where the gate version will cut out entirely. In this way you can isolate stuff in the sound and make it pop in with a gating effect and cut out again, cut off exactly where you want it to cut off. Or, do a crunchy low-fi effect that’s less extreme but still defines and reshapes the sound of the band’s contribution.

That’s right: these independent bidirectional bitcrushes are PER BAND. But I’ve not made myself entirely clear. Everything I said?

It runs between the two staggered filters that make up each resonant band. All separate.

That means you can crank up the treble one to catch a hi-hat, gate that hat to make it much louder, brighter and more staccato, and the gated sound runs through ANOTHER level of even more resonant peak-filter. Adds flavor. It means you can isolate a kick drum, have the bass bitcrush-gate ONLY trigger off the kick, and then it filters that bitcrush again for a beefy, reinvented sound. If other parts of the kick show up in mids or highs, you can include them too, with separate gate dynamics! And you can balance all this with dry/wet if you really want to bring in the original sound.

And then you can crank the mid crush UP all the way and sweep it around for the most savage de-rezzed roar you ever heard. And on ConsoleH you’ll be able to apply a gate… but you’ll also be able to apply speaker-like lowpass and highpass to give your nastiness a more organic, textural flavor after you used HipCrush to generate it. (and you can do that now, by using last week’s plugin, Cabs2)

Looking forward to getting out ConsoleH before 2026, and now I really do believe I’ll be able to give hip-hop and all related/subsequent genres something by which new sounds can be invented, even for kids on laptops or Raspberry Pis. And then I’ll put out ConsoleX2, and you can mix and match any and all of those as you please. Have fun! :)

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.

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