Airwindows

kStation

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.

Date September 28, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Discontapeity

TL;DW: Discontapeity combines air modeling with tape-style overdrive.

Discontapeity in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Subtlety’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Discontapeity.zip (496k) standalone(AU, VST2)

TapeHack came out, and boom! Everyone immediately wanted an update to ToTape that incorporated it.

I mean, fair. But have you considered taking it and making it LESS like tape?

I did. Discontapeity might be a cumbersome name, but when it finds its way into new models of Airwindows Console you’ll know it by the label I put on it, which is simply ‘More’.

No form of tape, real or modeled, does the type of air nonlinearity characteristic of loud sound over distance. That’s not even a thing. It’s strictly left to my plugins Discontinuity and Disintegrate for the bolder audio-wreckers, and as a permanent part of the sound of ConsoleX. It’s built into both channel and buss on that, for the purpose of delivering more convincingly loud-sounding mixes, as needed.

Add TapeHack to it, or to be more accurate, change both things to lean closer to each other in behavior, and an interesting effect emerges.

TapeHack allows for intense overdrive, a gain boost of 10x much like my Z series filters. Discontinuity layers three instances of the effect so it can go up to extremely high SPLs and emulate unusual sounds for sound design purposes (Disintegrate can go even farther).

Discontapeity pulls all that back. Less gain. Only one stage of Discontinuity, expanded slightly to compensate. It’s cleaner, simpler, and though there’s still a little bit of gain on tap, it doesn’t try to take that very far.

Instead, if you leave it at 0.0, you have a very clean subdued ‘more’ that is still a touch bigger and fuller than bypass. And if you bring it up to the middle of 0.5 or so, the sound blooms like it might in a real studio in the golden age of tape and giant mixing desks. If you push it to 1.0, as far as you can crank, that’s where you get a touch of distortion and overload, still in a relatively polite way. For smashing drums and such, try layering it after regular TapeHack, or perhaps SquareRoot or some other unusual intensifier: Sinew, maybe?

No, I didn’t update the flagship tape emulator ToTape. Every day I’m learning more about what I’ll do, when I do. But maybe, what you need is not me including every possible real-tape coloration and behavior… instead, try taking some of those qualities and boiling them down to ever-simpler forms so you can have some of the stuff you want while letting maximum tone and sonority through your music.

Think of it as sonic bloom, or scale and bigness, or simply ‘more’. You can still use TapeHack, or indeed ToTape8 or 7. Not every worthy exploration is in the direction everybody else is going. This one’s designed to show up on both Console channel plugins and buss plugins, and still be good enough to permanently include in both places. 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.

Date September 21, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

kGuitarHall2

TL;DW: kGuitarHall2 puts things in a Loud Room.

kGuitarHall2 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
kGuitarHall2.zip (610k) standalone(AU, VST2)

When I do a GuitarHall reverb, I always have certain things in mind.

As a kid, the first concert I ever went to was a Night Ranger concert. (other concerts included Bad Brains at a tiny college gig, and Go Ahead which was the closest I’ll ever get to a Dead Show.) Night Ranger was in a hockey arena in Michigan, and the thing about it was that the air crackled with volume. It was overwhelming and kinda scary, at least for a kid.

I’ve not found much to remind me of that experience, and then I kept developing GuitarHall, and now I’m getting somewhere with that journey.

kGuitarHall2 takes advantage of new measurement techniques I’ve developed: I’ve always been interested in peak vs. RMS loudness, in fact Meter measures and depicts entirely peaks and doesn’t show RMS at all. It turns out that you can rate reverbs by how peak-heavy they are versus how RMS-loud they are, and even run separate measurements for the full sound and for zeroing in on the midrange just where the ear is most sensitive. And it all led me to a ‘small hall’ sound that emphasized peaks a huge amount.

This causes the reverb to sound like it’s farther away. Try enough variations, and you can get some intense effects… and when you put the right energy in there, things get loud. You’ve got Derez to pitch down the whole space in two separate ways, stepped (mellow) and continuous (gnarly), you’ve got the usual sustain and filter controls (in this case a normal type of filter, Pear), and you’ve got the new control, Positin (think ‘Position’).

This is where the plugin really takes a leap into a new world. I’ve already designed it to sit properly with brighter tonality, unlike the ones where I’ve followed Bricasti’s tonal lead: I’m trying to do something different now. Adjusting the position in the reverb gives you a whole new ability to shape the tone, where you can move the sound source back up against the wall and get very convincing positionings, much like how a real studio engineer would move the drumkit back and forth until the ultimate sound was reached.

This is a subjective thing! Don’t expect it to be the same each time, though you might have favorite positions for things. There’s a world of difference between a When The Levee Breaks positioning and a Stairway To Heaven positioning though both were John Bonham, in the same haunted studio. With kGuitarHall you can move all the drums, or only some of them, or whatever other instrument, around to sit everything in the mix where you want it to appear.

To have multiple layers in the mix, you’ll have to either run it on individual tracks, or use multiple auxes and send different sounds to different instances of the plugin, with different position settings (and possibly, other things tuned differently as well). I tend to do the latter. I’m not sure how important it is to have things running to different positionings in the same reverb… but if you’re shooting for a convincing, natural sound, this is a new and interesting way to go about that :)

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 September 14, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

SmoothEQ2

TL;DW: SmoothEQ2 is a wildly intuitive vibe EQ with clarity and intensity.

SmoothEQ2 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Filter’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
SmoothEQ2.zip (546k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Turns out there was a lot of potential in SmoothEQ.

The idea here was to go to a four-band, like the parametric in ConsoleX, but instead of peaks and notches make it fully use shelves in the manner of the original SmoothEQ, so it can deliver ultimate clarity when subtlety is needed.

Then, with the addition of a simpler type of filter (thanks to my livestream chat for knowing exactly how to specify these with great accuracy) it was possible to use even higher orders of filtering, even steeper crossovers for the shelves.

Then, the question ‘still Bessel, or go with Butterworth for the Q factor?’ got drastically derailed by the stranger question ‘why not just have all these Q factors vary according to the frequency settings of the bands?’

Not the settings of the crossovers, no… the settings of the BANDS. Sweeping a band moves both crossovers bordering it. So does that move a flat shelf around, which sounds like a nice thing to do?

Nope, because if you make the resonances track how close each center frequency is to each other, you get shelves that are also tilt EQs accentuating where in the band’s travel the band is. So if you push high-mid up, the cutoff against high gets steeper, and the cutoff against low-mid gets shallower, more Bessel-like. Hard to explain. You have a frequency band that is also a tilt EQ for just that shelf, and that follows a center ‘resonant peak’ which isn’t actually there at all.

What does this mean? Try it. Boost or cut stuff, sweep the bands around, see how they act like sweepable resonances but are actually tilting shelves. If you can (I know it’s unusual) and you have the four joystick design I had Yaeltex make for me, put fingers on all four joysticks and morph a sound into whatever you like on all bands simultaneously. The way this tracks your intentions with EQ, I think that would actually work. Or, any other way you can dedicate eight knobs to a bank of EQs, give that a try too. Or it’ll work perfectly fine just in the DAW as sliders, it’s just that this one lends itself incredibly well to hands-on control. There’s controllers for cheap that have tiny vertical faders with panpots over them: have the vertical faders be band volumes, and the panpot above it be the corresponding frequency.

This one I’m building into a Console version just for me :) but here it is, way earlier than that, so you can see what’s going into a Console version that comes after the promised ConsoleH. I told you I was going to let you swap out many different Consoles on a track-by-track basis, and I’ve got ideas for just that. Hope you like the preview that is SmoothEQ2.

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 September 7, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Chris

kStation

Discontapeity

kGuitarHall2

SmoothEQ2

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