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.

TL;DW: kStation is a realistic small room modeled after David Bowie’s vocal reverb.

kStation in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
kStation.zip (608k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Turns out I’m getting asked for smaller reverbs for a reason.

Comparatively small spaces can merge with a sound in an interesting way. Rather than adding a sustain, the reverb can turn into part of the tone, thickening and glamorizing it to the point that, if you listened to just the dry signal, it’d be a bit shocking… especially if it was recorded in a dead place like a studio or under a tent of blankets or what have you.

This is kStation, another extension of Airwindows reverbs in the direction I’m going. It takes everything you had in kGuitarHall2, the unusual midrange depth that comes across even on a cellphone, the ability to position your source in the virtual room, and it brings it to a tiny space that acts like a room, but isn’t inspired by one.

Because it’s inspired by David Bowie’s vocal sound on Station To Station, and that’s probably one of the very first digital reverbs.

No effort is being made to emulate vintage digital reverb things. None. There’s a kind of darkness out of those old discrete converter circuits: that’s handled instead by Bezier undersampling and filtering. You can get funny overtones by setting kStation’s filter over 0.5 (like the undersampling, the Bezier filter goes two ways) but they aren’t vintage-digital overtones, they’re something else, something new. You get depth but it’s not from modeling an antique reverb, it’s from where Airwindows algorithm development is going.

It’s a unique algorithm, generated to do just this, and it’s there to merge with your vocal (or whatever else you wish) and sound like a hit record. Specifically, it wants to give you the richness and sumptuousness of Bowie circa Station To Station. You’ll have to sing or it won’t work, but this and perhaps some Silken (also a nice trick for that stuff) and you can get a giant head start.

There’ll be more, but this one is gonna come in real handy. I 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.