Airwindows

StereoFX

TL;DW: Aggressive stereo widener.

Here’s the last plugin I had in the pipeline, ready to post: no reason not to take the effort to post it now. Thank you all for the well wishes: I’m really touched, you’re all so sweet I can hardly believe it’s the internet :) (but then, people might well say the same about me!)

StereoFX is a classic Airwindows plugin brought up to date and VSTified: it does three things that can contour the stereo image. None of them are as well behaved as Wider, but they’re interestingly different.

Stereo Wide basically runs the code from High Impact on the side channel. It gives a really aggressive widening effect (which will cancel in mono of course) and can bring an edgy quality to the wideness of your stereo channel.

Mono Bass is simply a highpass on the side channel: adjust to taste, by ear. It’s a very simple highpass, not that steep.

Center Squish is a neat twist on ‘widening’. Instead of touching the side channel, it does a simple sine-based saturation or distortion (Density style, not Spiral style) on the mid channel only. If you engage it, it progressively steps on the output of the mid channel but leaves side untouched. That means you can squash a stereo track slightly, giving it a little distortion, and let it squirt out to the sides a bit. You can combine this with a touch of the Stereo Wide, which works on a different algorithm. So it’s some unique tone colorings and techniques to serve the purpose of stereo widening. I hope you like it.

I got a new video light (well, a $30 lightbox to go on one of my existing LED lightbulbs) so I’m kind of excited to make more videos and stuff, and I’ve got a backlog of plugins to try, but understandably (see the DrumSlam post) I’m a little distracted. I want to bring my best for you guys but I also want to honor your kind wishes, so I will post StereoFX and then see if anything comes to mind that I can do, if not immediately for the end of July, then early August: I am also doing the occasional music livestreaming and find that I can express my feelings that way, even if it’s ‘skronk guitar over techno’. So I won’t try and force the plugins (they won’t run out, I promise) and soon I’ll be back in the swing of things. Oh, and the Patreon is doing OK, I won’t worry about that right now but that too is appreciated. If not for that, I wouldn’t have been able to go and support my sister when all this went down, because it made me able to drop everything and zip off to Pennsylvania: without the Patreon, I would struggle to have that much gas covered, and I wouldn’t have been free to go right then, and then I wouldn’t have seen my Dad alive for the last time. So I owe you guys things that can’t be expressed in software or money: thank you.

Date July 15, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 9 Comments

DrumSlam

TL;DW: Heavy-processing tape modeler.

DrumSlam

So this is not a sad plugin but it’ll be sort of a sad post and I may as well do it anyway: I’ll keep it brief and to the point, and it’s kind of relevant to the Airwindows plugin release schedule.

First, the plugin: this is DrumSlam. It was originally meant to sound like Massey TapeHead. It’s sort of a multiband tape emulation/distortion, and it didn’t end up sounding like TapeHead but it does have a sound of its own: all the more since it’s a technique I don’t normally use (multiband stuff rarely makes sense to my ear). I see it as an effect plugin more than general purpose, but as always I’m not the boss of you and you can use it however you please. It’s open source, so you can also use the code or do variations on it: all you have to do is credit that you’re using Airwindows code, and you can even charge for your own DrumSlam-based plugin provided you make the credit clear: in fact, since it’s not the ‘advertising clause’ version, you get to cite Airwindows and suggest that it makes your plugin sound special: if you ask, I’ll help you make that be true. I just don’t take personal responsibility for the sonics of plugins that use ‘Airwindows Open Source’ in their promotion, because there are still ways you could screw it up cooge if you’re also open source, I’d be able to look at the code and give my opinion on whether it’s maintaining the integrity of the input data.

So that’s DrumSlam. Try it, slam it, do stuff with it, it’s simply another type of tape emulation done somewhat Airwindows style, and it’s got its own sound that you might like.

Also, this is my Patreon, if you find these plugins indispensable please join it at the rate of however many plugins a year you think you’d be buying from me if they were sold at around $50 each, perpetual license complete with source code. It’s kind of a bargain, and the opposite of DRM: in soviet Airwindows, your rights manage me! cooge

Now, over to my status report. I think I’m going to be able to keep up my plugin releases at least through StereoFX next week and probably won’t even have to skip a week but it’s possible I won’t be able to focus, or I might derp some of the releases and get them wrong and have to fix them, like with Console5 last Xmas. Apology in advance, if so. The reason is the same as it was then. Last December 6th, my Mom died. She’d kept me from starving when I was starting up the Patreon, and I owe her everything. After that, January 23rd of this year, the cat many of you have seen in videos (my last cat since the other one got hit by a truck the year before) died. She was very old, and around 3 AM that morning she fell down and no vet office was open at 3 AM and I just cuddled her and was with her as she died, which was all I could do (I couldn’t have afforded veterinary care at the time anyhow, I was living on $858 a month from the Patreon). So it’s been a lot of loss around the turn of the year.

So, three days ago, Thursday July 5th, my Dad died. I’d got word he was in the hospital (he was VERY old and feeble) and I tore ass down to Pennsylvania to see him: he’d fallen and hurt himself and was unresponsive (like me, he lived alone and got a lot out of being in his home, his final years were good). This was the price of that freedom: he’d hurt himself at a time when nobody would check on him for at least half a day. Once in the hospital, he came to for long enough that my sister got to speak to him, and he was grateful to see her. But then he took another downturn, they resuscitated him, and had to do it so fiercely that it harmed him further. I did see him but he was mostly gone by then, was with my sister as the doctors broke the news that they couldn’t safely keep rescuscitating him, and we told them that in that case it was clear: keep caring for him, but there was nothing more they could really do. Roughly an hour later he passed on.

If I’m demanding of myself he’s part of the reason why, for fair and foul reasons. This was a guy I couldn’t really give gifts to: he was a brilliant scientist in his day, and there were no emotional things that didn’t go through that rational filter so if my gift wasn’t perfect he’d be openly unhappy with it. There was an exception: I’ve painted and cartooned and stuff like that, and he valued those things more than I do, and in his declining years I even drew some comic strips just for him. Maybe I’ll scan them now and put them up somewhere as a memorial of the only thing I could do that he uncritically loved. That sounds dark, but there was more to him than only that. When I was tiny he used to indulge a fierce and violent temper, and Mom got him to stop it… and he did, some of my siblings never saw that in all their lives. He was sad a lot of his life, but he was also the Dad who literally built our childhood television set from a Heathkit electronics kit, so I grew up playing Atari 2600 games on the TV my Dad had literally built from parts. To a nerd like me, that is awfully cool. He was a hard act to follow and a hard man to please, and though it was sometimes a rocky path I know that I was able to be supportive in his final years, and the last time I saw him alive and aware, I hugged him and I meant it… and he hugged back.

I think I’ll be able to keep the Airwindows release schedule going without missing a week. I think he would respect me wanting to do that: it’s the sort of thing he would do. Also, there’s nobody much left to DIE anymore now that my parents and my cat have gone, so at this stage it’s time to just keep doing what I do, and that’s what would please me and would’ve pleased them.

Well, not the cat. She would have demanded cuddles. But I was good for those, too.

Love you guys, and I will try not to put out any awful buggy derps of plugins, but fair warning in case I do: it’s been sort of a difficult half-year. It ought to start getting better, I feel I must be through the worst of it and I’m still here and will be OK. <3

Date July 8, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 27 Comments

DeRez

TL;DW: Analog-style bit and samplerate crusher.

DeRez

Here’s a little present to the open source community… and the bitcrusher community.

What would an analog bitcrusher even be? It doesn’t even make sense. You’ve got sixteen bits, eight bits, twelve bits: you can’t have, like, eight and a half bits.

Sure you can! DeRez is here! Its dark magic can be yours! If you don’t believe in dark magic, the source code can be and is yours under the MIT license. Folks who are constructing strange models of things like obscure old digital gear should find this useful: do whatever compansion thing you had in mind using for instance PurestConsole, then use DeRez to dial in the right amount of bitcrunch.

Here’s how you use it: slide the Frequency control down, to continuously sweep the sample-rate crushing. Slide the Resolution control down, to continuously sweep the bit crushing. There are no transition points: the algorithm will always let you do just a tiny bit more, or less, of either, because it’s really a floating-point algorithm at very high resolution. It’s doing a fairly simple samplerate crush and softening the transitions just a tad for an analog feel, and it’s doing the bit crush by chopping away bit-sized amounts and then truncating once it can no longer take away a whole ‘bit’. Due to this decision, a ‘bit’ can be any size at all, so you can sweep it without having transition points. Obviously, you can also automate the controls in your DAW to program continuous sweeps.

It should just work, and you’ll never have to lament, “But why can’t I set the bitcrusher to three and five-eighth bits?” Because now YOU CAN.

I know there are a few audiophile ears out there who’ll pop a blood vessel over this nasty little toy, but I’m not a ‘bit’ sorry. Those of you who love this will know who you are right away. Those of you who think this is a really irritating and pointless idea, this one is not for you, and there will be things coming up that are more to your taste.

This work is supported by Patreon, for those of you who like me making stuff even when I know it will get some flak and hate-comments: the whole point of being on Patreon for me is that I get freedom to do stuff that’s not popular. Mind you, it’s 2018, so this may well be one of the popular ones. Depends on whether bitcrushing and frequency crushing are ‘in’ or ‘out’. Another nice thing about keeping me around doing this stuff is that it stops mattering whether stuff is ‘in’ or ‘out’: I build the plugins on a Windows 7 VM and an OSX 10.6.8 system kept in a time capsule especially so that my stuff works EVERYWHERE, and by that I mean Mac, Windows, Linux and on machines so old they run PPC chips. Yep! The Mac builds are slightly larger because they’re triple binaries and run 32 bit, 64 bit, and PPC. They should probably also work on OSes older than 10.6.8 but I don’t even have any of those, it’s just build settings. So these plugins are as close as I can get to ‘Grandpa’s Tools’ levels of reliability, and you should never be forced to update, alter, or break your system just to keep up with compatibility with Airwindows plugins. This is in spite of Apple (for one) continuously breaking XCode w.r.t building for older OSes. Hence the old build system. Maybe one day I’ll be running that in a virtual machine that runs it ten times faster than the original laptop. Maybe I’ll run the Windows 7 virtual machine inside the 10.6.8 virtual machine inside the new computer. I will note that I have to keep the old Windows cut off from the internet, and have already had to do workarounds to stop Visual Studio breaking itself in a fit of pique that it can’t install Win10 over the Windows 7 and blow itself up, so it’s not only Apple that gets up to this stuff.

Support my Patreon, so I can keep on expanding the pool of plugins that don’t break your system demanding updates and wrecking the joint. I know acting that way gets you more money… because I barely have any money, and the folks working that strategy have lots of money. And it’s not a good enough excuse as far as I’m concerned, so as always I will just not do the behavior that I don’t like to see in others. Vote with your dollars, that’s a somewhat practical way to be heard. It won’t fix the world, but it definitely is able to keep me going :)

Date July 1, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 6 Comments

Single Ended Triode

TL;DW: Unusual analog modeling effects.

SingleEndedTriode

Everybody knows that analog modeling means distortion. (well… noise and distortion. And EQ, and overprocessing… but mostly distortion.)

However, it’s always the same sorts of distortion: soft or hard clipping generating harmonics. Here, have three totally different kinds!

Single Ended Triode does three things, and you don’t have to do them all at once (in fact you probably don’t want to).

The actual Single Ended Triode control is a special gain-staged saturation that’s asymmetrical. It’s a little like PurestWarm, only not, because rather than put a soft saturation on one-half of the waveform, it offsets everything and goes into the saturation with a bias voltage. Then it subtracts a related voltage, and scales the whole thing up or down based on how much distortion you’re looking to get. (shown in the source code, of course)

That means you have a ‘second harmonic generating’ asymmetrical distortion, but with NO crossover point. Unlike PurestWarm, SET is a continuous waveshaper just like using a real triode tube single-ended, and while you can crank it up to get obvious effects, its real magic is in using just a tiny amount to warm and sweeten things. It’s perhaps not ideal for the 2-buss because you’d simply be removing some of your mix energy on one half of the wave, but if the sweetening is what you need it might be worth it, because it’s a super clean way to do that. It’s only the asymmetrical distortion, and the interesting thing about that is: know how Spiral smooths the transition between sides of the sin() waveshaping, and that made it sound better? With Single Ended Triode, it’s capable of doing that transition when cranked way up… but used subtly, the entire audio output sits within one sin() calculation, and you don’t see a transition in the first place. This is literally why high end SET stereo rigs perform well for musicality and fluidness of sound: they have obvious faults but they’re great at avoiding crossover issues between push/pull sides of the circuit because they don’t have two sides to the circuit. It’s single-ended, and so is this algorithm unless you’re wildly distorting the heck out of it.

Crossover issues, you say?

Why yes. Meet Class AB (and Class B) Distortion.

This is the opposite. It adds nonlinearities as the signal passes through zero. It’s a STRONG tone coloring and certainly not for the 2-buss or nice mellow music: the Class B is downright nasty and you should be careful about using it if you have delicate tweeters, as it’ll create extremely harsh treble grit (though, interestingly, without Gibb effect converter clipping: that is when reconstruction of the wave makes treble go past what bass can do, when it clips the converter on highs. This is a kind that could blow your tweeters at super high volumes but does not clip the converter doing it)

The Class AB transitions through the middle of the wave in a more curvy way, causing the effect to lean towards the gritty upper-mids. Where might you find this kind of noise? Certainly not in any acoustic instrument. But… listen to certain old nasty tube Hammond organ sounds. Certain big guitar amps. Past a certain wattage, nearly every old tube amp is run push-pull (same with many transistor amps). They run hot, their calibrations drift… and one of the things that can happen to an amp is problems with that transition zone. Use Class B distortion and you’ll get very much the sound of purely transistor amps breaking down and going cold and gritty. Use Class AB (because with tubes, you’re probably going through output transformers and speakers that don’t have hi-fi tweeters) and you’ll get a bit of that gnarly rock-and-roll grit. There are expensive boutique stompboxes that can do this. Now you have it in a free, open-source plugin: open source devs, take note, because this one’s not often talked about or modeled. Most attention to amplifier crossover distortion has come from High End audiophile circles, and those guys have been getting mocked for decades. This stuff will not affect a frequency response plot. In certain systems of measurement you won’t even see it at all, and for years people have done naive measurement and claimed ‘it’s perfect, no further work needed!’ and the audiophiles were tearing their hair out, swearing that certain amps sounded like butt even if they measured ‘perfect’.

Little did they know that in 2018, musicians would be turning to those same horrible distortions for creative purposes, sweetening with Single Ended Triode, adding grit and attitude with Class AB distortion, and being able to put a layer of really brittle edgy brightness onto the occasional sound with Class B.

PS: some of you are having a lot of fun modeling existing hardware using elaborate combinations of Airwindows plugins. Just saying, these three sources of really specific coloration are exactly what you need to do that. Be careful of Class B as a little goes a long way (in fact, I would pick either Class AB or Class B but not both: study the circuit topology and only use AB and B where push/pull circuits actually exist, and remember they’re designed not to cause this kind of problem. AB contains overlap that stops the transition point from being exactly in the middle. Apply wisely.)

This work is supported by Patreon. The more of that there is, the larger projects I can do: for instance, I can’t make hardware on this budget. That could change if I keep doing better and better: I like trying to do bigger projects. For instance, it’s too late tonight to stream but I’ve been livestreaming some modular synthesizer jams on my Youtube (and Twitch) channels, and I’ve got a neat new trick for next time. I’ve been researching a cyborg-music thing where a tiny computer (an Axoloti experimenter board) comes up with generated chord sequences that I play along to. When it goes well, it’s a strange exploration into unforeseen harmonic realms. When it doesn’t, I just get lost :) but I’ve got a new trick: retune the soloing synth to the new chords on the fly. But not over 12 notes, just 5, then it wraps! That means chord switches aren’t as jarring, and a small amount of adapting to the key switch is needed, but not as much as manually/humanly adapting to an ever-changing harmonic structure. It’s like it can follow melodic ideas but then throw in half-step or whole-step corrections on top of what the human’s playing. You’ll see (or hear). I’ve been saving all the Axoloti patches for all these synth jams and look forward to sharing ’em when things get good enough: at this level it’s very much programming.

One final note: I need to do some rescheduling of upcoming plugins to get myself time to work on the backlog now that I’m going double speed. Things will still come out at the same pace, but I’m going to ask you this: VariMu isn’t ready for next week, and I have some plugins that are. Which would you like to see, and in what order: DeRez, DrumSlam, StereoFX? DeRez is the samplerate/bitcrusher (analog style: they are continuous controls, not stepped). DrumSlam is from when I tried to do Massey TapeHead as an AU, and it didn’t turn out that much like TapeHead but it did come out pretty cool. And StereoFX is a far more aggressive stereo-widener, more suited to tracks than the 2-buss.

Which would you like next week, and the week after? I’ll give you them in that order. By then, I’ll have other stuff in the pipeline, and I’ll have the list on Patreon updated with accurate release dates. Hopefully getting DeRez and DrumSlam and StereoFX will tide you over until then :)

Date June 24, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 10 Comments

Chris

StereoFX

DrumSlam

DeRez

Single Ended Triode

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