SubTight
TL;DW: SubTight uses a variation on the Creature algorithm to tighten sub-lows.
So here’s another interesting little tool that’s not been seen before.
Creature has a special mode where you can set the dry/wet to ‘inverse’, cancelling out what the algorithm produces. It’s a soft slew clipper, not a normal algorithm or a simple filter, so what it cancels isn’t easily controllable. However, for the most part it darkens and distorts the sound, and then when you stack up multiple poles of it, it becomes uncontrollable, particularly as frequency drops.
So, in theory, you could use it as an increasingly steep lowpass… and subtract it from dry, to make something that acts like a highpass.
What happens when you use a distorted lowpass to take out bass? It’s not able to soak up all the lows, as if it was a simple filter. What happens when multiple stages of it cause the deepest bass to go unstable and wild? That part cancels first, or ends up overcanceling and making a sort of ‘node’ in the midbass that’s totally cancelled, while distorted sub-bass gets through inverted.
All right. That said, what if you just keep the number of stages in check, and only bring in enough of it to cancel out the super lows, or simply cut them back a little? That would be a sub-bass conditioner with the following qualities: it’ll give you an increasingly steep cutoff, it’ll emphasize dynamics and impact, and it will resist totally removing bass content in favor of reshaping it, tightening it, highlighting impact and punch.
That’s why this plugin is called SubTight. It’s not exactly a filter, much less a sharp and accurate filter. It’s optimized so that you can hear where bass really starts to cancel out, and the idea is you can go up to that point, and then pull back. To do a clean steep low cut, use something else. This is a subs conditioner, that’ll give a different foundation on things.
The original release of SubTight is available at SubTightOriginal.zip(497k)
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.
VCV Rack module
Hiya! Just a little (unrelated to this plugin) thing I noticed: recent versions of the LinuxVSTs.zip file appear to contain a couple extra files that I assume shouldn’t be there, titled “._Fracture2.so” and “._kChamberAR.so”. These are in addition to the actual “Fracture2.so” and “kChamberAR.so” binaries.
They’re not here on my end, and I’ve just unzipped both the Linux zips and they weren’t there, even checking for invisible files. Is your unzip process adding them somehow?
Hmm. Taking a closer look at the contents of the zip file, it appears those files are actually inside the “__MACOSX/LinuxVSTs/” folder. I used to just delete the whole “__MACOSX” folder, but lately I’ve been using a script to automate downloading and extracting the zip, using a wildcard “*.so” as filename…
So yes, you’re right, this was at least partly due to my unzip process! But those two are the only .so filenames under the “__MACOSX” folder, and I’m pretty sure they’ve only appeared there after I made my unzip script, because I didn’t initially encounter this issue. (I’m not a Mac user, and I don’t really know what the deal is with the “__MACOSX” folder. I know a lot of zip files presumably created on Macs contain them…)