Airwindows

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

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.

Date October 26, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Cabs2

TL;DW: Cabs2 uses really phasey filters to be a speaker cabinet simulator.

Cabs2 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Amp Sims’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Cabs2.zip (496k) standalone(AU, VST2)

There’s been many ways I’ve tried to do speaker sounds. Impulse responses, dynamic modifications of them, filtering, loudness factors… lots of things to try. This is the second Cabs plugin but not even the second time I’ve tried this.

This is the first time I ended up wanting to put it in a Console plugin and build it into the mixing desk, for every channel, though.

Cabs2 follows the line of experimentation PointyGuitar began. It started with PointyGuitar, delivering an interesting amplike tone entirely in the box. Set that up right and it’s very Airwindows: a pungent, intense tone that’s not produced by ANY of the normal means for doing such a thing. It all comes out of a very poorly behaved filter (AngleFilter, specifically) that gets stacked up to make a strange sort of hyper-saturation that repeatedly filters between gain stages using the same method I use on SmoothEQ2 and the recent PearEQ. PointyGuitar was that used on the most unhinged, raw filter code I could make. The same code was used in the speaker simulation for PointyGuitar.

PointyDeluxe went even harder. Those filters can go crazy if adjacent bands are too different, and PointyGuitar actually has twice the filter bands you’d think it does: there are buffer bands between the ones you use, smoothing the behavior. So PointyDeluxe takes away everything else and just gives you the bands, even if the sound’s going to go crazy, and it removes the speaker simulating and tries to do it all with the one algorithm. PointyDeluxe is a monster, and either the worst sounding junk you could imagine, or the best brutal industrial metal sound you could imagine. This is because, when you distort the way PointyDeluxe does, you’re hypersaturating a certain frequency range but that brings out all the other frequencies as well, until the result is the most mix-filling, dense, full-range sound ever. Two guitars and there’s no room for anything else, automatically.

Cabs2 is another pivot. Yes, you can 100 percent run it after PointyDeluxe and have a speaker-cabinet style tone again. It will roll highs like a speaker if you set it just right, and reshape bass like a big cabinet which will fatten it up and move some more air, and both of these are why you’d use a cabinet simulator… though in fact Cabs2 really is not a speaker model at all. What it’s doing is showing you how the phase gets really messy and nonlinear when you’re running into a real live speaker. It does all that phase messiness just from what kind of filter it is. If you always made filters to be ‘correct’ you’d never stumble across it in a million years.

But… what if you just started using it for everything?

And that’s where it started showing its stuff. You see, exactly modeling a speaker cab is complicated. It’s not simply an EQ curve, sure, but it’s also about as complicated as simulating a live room, only tiny. These things honk and resonate and buzz and the cones break up in bell mode resonances you don’t even get in a room, and when they do they burn up energy in physical distortion that affects the length of the resonance and its character. This is why I’ve been thinking in terms of trying to design a mix speaker that’s more NS-10-ey than NS-10s: if you accept that the breakup modes of the flat-sided cone are part of how that classic mix speaker ‘gets out of the way’ of the sound so quickly, you can imagine other ways to do that.

Meanwhile, Cabs2 is just a bandpass (a lowpass up high, and a highpass down low). But it’s a bandpass that screws up the phase in both places, always to steepen the cutoff at all costs… but without any of the resonances or other behaviors from a real speaker. It’s like a purified cab sim without the cab: just the essence, through a weird algorithm that shall we say is not phase linear. A ‘bad EQ’ in the way a speaker is a ‘bad EQ’.

We can use the heck out of this.

So, now you don’t have to put PointyGuitar on non-guitar-related things to shape the sound in this way. When ConsoleX came out, it had (and has) lowpass and highpass filters based on my Isolator filter, which is purely a biquad-designed ‘real’ filter for isolating frequencies without totally screwing them up. It’s not phase-linear or anything, but Isolator is still relatively ‘nice’. Cabs2 is not. It’s kind of messy, but in a good way. I think it’s very likely that if you want to go for highpasses and lowpasses in mix, you might want to not only cut away the frequencies but also transition in that speakerlike way, the colorful way. And I think it’ll work great for any situation in mix where you’re trying to sit something in the mix and have it feel right.

This is finding its way into ConsoleX2, but I’m doing all I can to invent ConsoleH first: let me know if this speaker-y textural thing is also what you’d want for a hiphop Console, try it on stuff. I’ve not yet decided whether the highpass/lowpass role in that should be this type of filter, or something more radical like a BezEQ concept where it’s gritty and reeks of bad digital. I feel like I can get enough abrasion into ConsoleH in other ways and maybe I should use this to unleash totally different textures. Hope you like it!

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 October 19, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

kAlienSpaceship

TL;DW: kAlienSpaceship is an unreal realistic reverb.

kAlienSpaceship in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
kAlienSpaceship.zip (614k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Though I’ve got a lot of other irons in the fire, my work on reverbs is ramping up something fierce. I’m going through millions of possibilities with a genetic algorithm, then turning around and rendering out dozens (hundreds!) of possibilities, mostly in the area of small spaces like kStation because they seem to lend themselves to what I’m doing.

And then there’s kAlienSpaceship. If I can top this one, I will, but the work’s going in the other direction at the moment, so it’s time to put out the mothership.

This one works like recent reverbs do: it’s got the same controls such as a DeRez and a Filter control that are both Bezier undersampling, and both two-way controls with ‘brightest or highest sample rate’ at the center, left for stepped and ‘good sounding’ tones, and right for an edgier, stranger take. Moving DeRez to the right can produce a ‘pitch dive’ effect while the effect is still running: move it to the left to cleanly shift the entire reverb down in pitch and make it even more massive in size.

The intention here is to make an ‘unreal realistic’ reverb. Not a giant real-world room or hall, but more like an imaginary space… indeed, a spaceship. It’s so vast it doesn’t come off like a real room, but neither does it have the abstractness of something like Galactic. Instead it suggests strange geometries, unusual shapes. It was designed back when I was still debugging Bezier Undersampling, and had an odd alien quality, but it’s up to speed with my current work so there’s a realism factor too. It’s synthetic and realistic, pristine but quirky. Not as much as the earlier reverb that acted like there was a slapback integrated into the reverb, but enough to produce a real character.

Use kAlienSpaceship if you’re looking for a very big hall or stadium, or if you’re doing a synthetic thing and want to gloss it up with deep shimmery ambience, or if you need to expand something out into seemingly infinite space. You can set it to be many kinds of realistic, but it’ll also go way beyond that into spaces that bear no relation to reality. I find it to have a fun imaginary quality that sits well with artificial sounds, but you needn’t stop there. Hope you like the new spaceship to go play music in! :)

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 October 12, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

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SoftClock2

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