Airwindows

Channel6

TL;DW: The latest Channel uses the Spiral algorithm.

I use the plugin Channel to test out my latest code regarding things like how to prevent denormalized numbers, what’s the best noise shaping to return to the floating point buss, and so on. That’s because after a fairly brief debug period (at first, the model-choosing popup wasn’t actually changing anything and you always got SSL behavior) the plugin was established as a totally complete plugin: it always used the same ‘Density’ algorithm for the saturation, it always blended that with dry signal using a drive control that was really a dry/wet control (which gave it its openness at partial settings), and it always used the same slew clipping and simple IIR highpass code each time, which was so simple that it couldn’t be improved.

And it’s always been ‘one’ of my most popular and successful plugins, through all those variations. Once there was a big blind shootout on the most popular plugin forum (back when people did that) and someone put up my stuff against several contenders including the most hyped plugins out there. At the time I was selling plugins for $50 a pop, and I’d hoped someone would pick BussColors and do a comparison against my flagship tone-emulator, and have it clobber its rivals in blind testing.

Instead they picked the latest Channel, and used its settings of ‘API’ and ‘Neve’ and ‘SSL’ (in other words ‘slew clipping and a simple highpass and Density’, no real ’emulation’ just shaping set to calibrated amounts), and that free plugin was the one that clobbered the pricey rivals. And soon blind testing went out of fashion, because such shenanigans get embarrassing I guess :) And I didn’t get any sales out of it as Channel was free, but it was fun to watch.

So will this be…

Channel is back in version 6, and there’s one key change. The distortion algorithm which I thought was unbeatable has now been beaten by Spiral… so now Channel uses Spiral, not Density, for its distortion model! For once this should be a plainly audible change: Spiral’s less fat-sounding than the Density algorithm. (I fixed the bug with the dry/wet control in the video: now dry doesn’t clip)

What won’t change is this: you’d be surprised how little ‘processing’ can give you a great, analog-style sound. Literally all Channel does is apply a very simple IIR highpass, add a distortion that’s very clear and pure-sounding, and do a slew clipping set so high that it will almost never kick in. The highpass isn’t very steep, because it’s just one stage of interleaved IIR filter (a trick I use in a more complicated way in Capacitor). These are subtle, gentle differences… but they’re done with absolutely minimal processing, not tons of processing, and the data integrity is kept pristine through long double math and noise shaping to the floating point buss. In simpler terms: this doesn’t suck your tone like heavy digital processing does, this applies ‘hardware-like’ changes calibrated to measurements of real hardware, and this does it at impressively low CPU compared to other plugins of this type.

And it’s free, always has been. So if you feel the need to behave as if it was $50 for a perpetual license, lifetime support and the source code (I know, a whole $50 for all those things? Shocking) then please pretend you were buying one of my other plugins instead, and go to the Patreon and pledge the amount that equals $50 a year.

Then, in a year, if I’ve made another plugin you like, do it again :)

Date August 26, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

BitGlitter

TL;DW: Hardware-style bit and resolution crusher, like really old sampler.

BitGlitter

Just like last week, when I added a compressor to a big pile of free compressors, this week I’m adding a bitcrusher to a growing pile of free bitcrushers.

Just like last week, there’s a little more to it than that.

I’m updating-in-place DeRez, simply to change the labels on the controls (there’s also a tweak with denormalization code, but that’s because people asked for it to gate to silence at low bit depths and that isn’t actually how you gate a bitcrusher to low bit depths: I demonstrate in the video for BitGlitter). The controls needed to be Rate and Rez, not Freq and Reso, because it’s not a filter and Reso is supposed to stand for Resolution, not Resonance. DeRez is the simpler, purer bit and frequency crusher, and is still the best ‘analog setting’ bitcrusher (because it lets you use floating-point or fractional frequency and bit crushes). It’s a very pure example of those things and you can make it gate with a touch of DC offset from DC Voltage, and it’s even got a touch of grit softening when it frequency crushes to improve its tone.

BitGlitter, however, isn’t DeRez. BitGlitter’s something a lot more sophisticated: a kind of sampler emulator. At every stage it’s designed not for bitcrush alone, but to get the particular tonalities you can get out of primitive old samplers. An earlier attempt intentionally went after the old Akai sound, but currently BitGlitter has no specific model. It’s just there to dial in a kind of punchy grit that will make beats sit well against other elements: the video demonstates this.

Now, I know there are people who get mad when I make plugins like these. They say, ‘stop making the sound worse!’ and I understand what they mean, but sorry, I won’t stop because I know there are elements to certain ‘bad’ sounds that aren’t just ‘bad’ but usefully different. BitGlitter maximizes this as much as I can, and might be the go-to textural element for this sort of thing if generic bitcrushing etc. just never works for you. And then for some people I think it’ll immediately be their best friend, but I don’t need to explain to that crew what this is. For those who aren’t used to ‘crappy old sampler’ magic…

First, BitGlitter’s got gain trim going into a stage of Spiral analog-style saturation. You can overdrive the input effectively. Then, it does a hint of bitcrushing and splits into two separate frequency crushers, each set slightly different. This isn’t ‘accurate’ to any real retro sampler, but it helps broaden the sound. The output of these are blended and given an output gain and a dry/wet in case you need to sneak a little clarity back in there, and a slight averaging blur is added to the blend to further emulate analog circuitry.

The result is a coarser, more opaque sound which still lacks modern digital ‘edge’: you can plainly see on a metering plugin like Voxengo SPAN how the highs are softened. It’s not a digital bright-maker, it’s a texture-changer and impact-maker. Especially if you go for darker regions of the Bit Glitter control, you can use this to add ridiculous amounts of midrange punch in that ‘retro hip-hop’ kind of way. There’s a visceralness and aliveness to the grunge because it’s made by an algorithm to act like analog gear might: you won’t get the same result out of just a pile of typical DAW bitcrush and EQ. BitGlitter will do the extreme damage you might be looking for, but it’ll do it with a personality that contributes instead of detracts.

If you like me doing this sort of thing, and especially if you’re using one or more of my free plugins so much that you’d have bought one if they were being sold at $50 a plugin, you can support my Patreon. I can keep doing this stuff thanks to the Patreon. It’s been kind of rough over the last couple years but I think I’m up to the point where I’m sure I’ll continue to live and do this work: not that I can have health care or anything, but I’m pretty careful and plugins aren’t usually dangerous, so with a bit of luck I’ll be okay. Sometimes I can even go places and do things, if I try and cut down on things like food! Also, existing on a bit over $1000 a month keeps me in touch with the 2018 musician lifestyle :D and the great thing about Patreon is it’s more stable than operating as a commercial business was. For that I thank my patrons <3

Date August 20, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 9 Comments

VariMu

TL;DW: A more organic variation on Pressure.

VariMu

Thank you for your patience! Usually I keep up a rapid pace of plugin releases. Due to some personal tragedy I’ve spoken of before, I had to take a little down time, but I feel prepared to carry on as I did before.

I’ve got something nice: everybody likes yet another compressor, right? I’ve got ButterComp, Swell, Logical4, the one in CStrip, Surge, SurgeTide, Pyewacket, Thunder, and of course Pressure4. All those are free (and I’m working on getting them open source as well, but first I want to get the actual plugins out).

So clearly what we need is YET ANOTHER free compressor as we plainly don’t have nearly enough. We must run all the compressors, in a row, until everything is so compressed we can’t even stand ourselves! :D

No… there’s a non-joke reason. And that reason is, all those sound very different. They won’t all work for everyone: for instance, Pyewacket is all about retaining the attack transients of things and just stepping on the tails of envelopes. Swell is about stomping out those very attack transients until they’re all gone. Surge is about very smooth gain shifts that are totally transparent and more like an automatic gain control. SurgeTide is the same but more so, it’s almost completely unmanageable. Logical4 is about acting like a hardware stereo 2-buss compressor, and so on.

VariMu comes from Pressure, originally. What it does differently is trigger using different math: it uses the square of the input signal, not just the signal alone, and it also handles brief transients differently. This makes it sound very different from Pressure, so if you like Pressure you should try it… and if you didn’t like Pressure, you should also try it, because it sounds different.

That’s really the essence of all these Airwindows compressors (perhaps more than any other class of plugin). They’re all different algorithms, often pretty weird ones, and sound very different from each other. So you have to pick which ones fit with your type of music… but also, you don’t have to pick, because they’re all available to you for experimenting with, and if I come up with something weird and non-useful (SurgeTide comes to mind) then thanks to the Patreon I can put it out anyway, without worrying that it would kill the buzz and have people wondering if Airwindows has lost it. Even if it’s useful to just one person, I can release anything, no matter how weird.

But this time, I don’t think I’ll be making excuses like that. VariMu has a good sound to it. I hope you like it :)

Date August 12, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 11 Comments

Spiral2

TL;DW: Spiral with controls including Presence.

Spiral2

I will need to take a week to sort of meditate and settle my mind, but it was important to me to still be giving stuff to my fans and patrons etc. so I was looking around for something fairly easy to do. For instance, take Spiral and give it the ‘Density/Drive’ treatment, including things like pre and post gain and a highpass and a dry/wet. Busywork but nothing particularly innovative.

I think Dad would have been proud that I stumbled across something that was kind of innovative anyhow. Now I have Spiral2. It has those controls (that people really wanted: and if you set them to unity/neutral, they bypass so you can have EXACTLY the same as Spiral itself, if you like) but something else happened…

It occurred to me, if I was blending between dry signal and the sin() function saturated signal using the signal itself as the blend factor, I was just using a sample. Well, I also knew how to store a sample, and then the next time it’d be ‘lastSample’. And what would happen if I blended between dry and the saturated one… using the PREVIOUS sample?

With low frequency stuff, pretty much nothing. But what if there was high frequency stuff? What’d happen then?

Turns out, it’s a little like ‘Pyewacket’, my compressor that compresses into a ‘negative Density’ effect that lets peaks through. With that, the front of the wave is unusually pure and punchy, and there’s better articulation of sounds. With Spiral2, it lets onset transients through, especially if they’re happening suddenly out of existing silence (and bear in mind it can be only one sample of silence for it to work). It’s not a super obvious effect… but if you use Spiral to chop off peaks, and add this new effect (which I could only call Presence) then you can get quite the opposite effect: at full Presence, it sounds like everything’s being distorted but the meters show how onset transients are still getting through.

If you set it halfway, it becomes very close to peaking at exactly 0 dB. If you set it to 0 you get the original Spiral (note that it still has the ‘continuing around the sin() curve’ effect so if you over-slam it, it’ll choke and go quieter).

So, I wanted to do something nice for my peeps since everybody has been so kind and supportive. Turns out my muse thought that was the sweetest intention ever, and really came through for me. Enjoy Spiral2: you’ll find that Presence is quite a striking effect. I think in extreme cases it’s TOO much air, but that’s why it’s on a slider, which is really just a crossfader between the two ‘circuits’, normal and with the one sample delay on the ‘sense’ circuit.

See ya soon, and I hope you like Spiral2. If you would have dropped $50 on this without a moment’s hesitation once you hear what it can do by trying it, please do that using the Patreon. I’m looking to keep expanding and be more ambitious, if that’s OK. It’s more fun being ambitious with a budget, and food and shelter and stuff :)

Date July 22, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 9 Comments

Chris

Channel6

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VariMu

Spiral2

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