TL;DW: Dyno is a lot like Mojo, but for intensity instead of loudness.

Dyno.zip(342k)

I’ll be quick: some family stuff is up and I’m running late, but I’ve got a plugin all the same.

Except it isn’t all the same. It’s similar in some ways to Mojo (from last week), but Dyno has a completely different character. Instead of loudenating, it ‘intensenates’. It’s a little bit like Remap in that way, but it’s not the same as Remap. You won’t get a volume boost out of it really, nor will it let you slam it for fatter peaks.

Instead, it brings fire and intensity to the audio and reshapes the waveform in a Mojo-like ‘evolution of Spiral’ way. Because it doesn’t take to slamming in the same way, it’s going to be a more subtle effect, but for those who got excited by Remap, this one deserves your attention.

Because some stuff’s come up, I can’t guarantee the usual Airwindows stuff a week from now. Might have to skip a week for plugins, or fail to do the Monday livestream (tomorrow should be good though). Since I’ve put out a plugin (some quite good) for the last 27 weeks without a break (over half a year without a pause!) I am hoping me and you both can handle a hiccup in the pedal-to-the-metal Airwindows free plugin release schedule: I do my best, but it’s just me up here and I might need to take a week to take care of things. I’m just saying, ‘cos people might freak out and think I died. Not yet! So far as I know! :)

Oh, and the results are in for ‘dislike and subscribe’: it was a fun experiment, but it didn’t do anything. You can keep disliking videos if you really want to, so long as you enjoy the actual plugins.

If so, by all means go and add $50 a year (or heck, a dollar) to my Patreon and I will get back to the maniacal ferocity of incessant plugin-making as soon as I can. I definitely need to take a breath and get my bearings: it’s getting so some people can’t handle it without a roadmap and/or curated collections, and maybe that would be another kind of release I could do, namely designed sets of plugins that serve as starting points. We shall see. Have fun playing with Mojo and Dyno and Biquad etc etc, and feel free to throw ideas for me to consider while I un-clench and take a breath for the first time in half a year! :D

TL;DW: Mojo is a biggenator that also works as a loudenator.

Mojo.zip(342k)

Happy accidents! What I was trying to do was add a blend control to Spiral, so I could make a Channel that let you go between the original, ‘fatter’ sound and the cleaner, more transparent but less fat Spiral sound.

Instead, I got this (and another, complementary plugin to be revealed later). I coded up a refinement to the algorithm, where the ‘curve factor’ of Spiral got modified by powers of itself, or powers of powers of itself… up to the fourth power, which turned out to sort of have MAGICAL powers, or at least that’s how it seemed when I worked out what was happening to my test sine waves.

Mojo’s the result. It’s a neat little algorithm that doesn’t sound anything like Density, or Spiral. Instead, it sounds like concentrated HUGE. Even at no added boost, it makes the sound a lot fatter (much like what was asked: a more refined algorithm that still gets the fatness of Density). But then there’s more… when you start slamming it.

Turns out this simple little algorithm, one single transfer function without extra parts or switches or added tricks, soaks up input gain like nothing I’ve seen.

Understand, it’s not ‘clean’. It thickens and fattens the sound without any real EQ change, by where it puts the energy and how it rounds off peaks. It’s got a weirdly effective way of being able to round stuff off and then turn it into a mostly flat-topped output, like full-on digital clipping style loudness, but with neatly sculpted little curves going in and out of the flat stuff. It’s also such a nonintuitive algorithm that I wasn’t able to find an ideal spot to just straight clip it… so, like original Spiral, if you push beyond its limits it’ll start wavefolding on you (which can be an indication of too much slam). But the sweet spot is unusually wide and forgiving, and it sounds really loud while you explore that maximum limit.

Mojo is an accident, but it’s also an obvious ‘popular’ plugin. Check to see if you’re okay with the extreme fattening effect it has, since it does really have a sound and isn’t what you’d call clean, even in the absence of extra boost. But if you were already looking for some ‘mojo’ to be added, this Mojo might be just the type… and, like the original Density algorithm, this one is likely to show up in other plugins as an added saturation element, because it’s got a distinct flavor that will help certain plugins do their thing.

If you’d buy Mojo for $50 (perpetual license, lifetime support, plus install it on as many computers as you want and get the source code) you can go and pledge $50 a year at my Patreon. Or, use it anyway. Subscriptions are a big topic of discussion these days, so by acting like you need to stay on MY subscription it helps show that open source is the way of the future, and better than renting DRMed software that can be taken away from you. Airwindows is more future proof than many things because of this choice. Is it worth doing in this way, or do you have to take stuff away from people to force them to pay? We shall see, but I can’t help but notice I’m still here and haven’t run out of ideas.

Now, I AM running out of ways to make sense of the massive huge open source freely available yours-to-own library. So come hang out on my Monday Q&A livestream and we can talk about possible ways I can assemble ‘Airwindows kits’ to give people only a small set of the plugins at a time so it’s more approachable. You can always go and add anything else out of the library, but it’s time to get this juggernaut more approachable for newcomers :)