Airwindows Hombre: AU, Mac and PC VST

[jinxtigr]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzNkUi-Xjnw

TL;DW: Atmosphere and texture.

Hombre

Once upon a time there was the blues.

No, let's be more specific. Once upon a time (and even now!) there was ZZ Top. Brainchild of the Reverend Billy Gibbons, swathed in funk and mystery, serving up juicy grooves from the heart of Texas.

Thing is, Rev. Billy tells some tall tales and their engineer of the day, Terry Manning, he don't talk ATALL.

So what is a person to do when they hear these albums and the guitars slide off that vinyl like grease off a hot griddle, and you know you can't just put up a mic on anything amp-shaped and get near that magic? You know those are dirt guitars, but the whole texture's different. Skulduggery is afoot. And the boys ain't tellin'.

Well, here's what I did. It seemed to me that some of the mojo sounded like echoes and delays, but not just any old ones. You can take something as small as a dentist's mirror, put it near the mic, and aim it until you're reflecting another copy of your sound into the mic again: the delay is tiny but real, and the tone? Well, that's based on how big the panel (or dentist's mirror) is. If it's tiny, you get only highs. If it's a big ol' panel, or a floor or wall, you get down into maybe the lowest bass. Any panel will do this. Billy and Terry might have been constructing lil' forts around the amps, making a purely acoustic home for the blues. You can literally pick what range of sound you reflect, how long a delay it is (still so tiny it's not heard as one!) and you don't have to make it full-range: a softer reflector ignores highs, smaller panels ignore lows. If you want to juice up what your mic hears, this is one way to do it.

If you're playing with super-short echoes, you're reinforcing the lows. Unless it's out of phase, flipped upside down in the DAW, in which case you're cancelling them! And then, supposing you have one delay that's in phase and one that's out, and you calibrate them just right, and then you're neither reinforcing or cancelling the lows, instead you're just thickening the texture of whatever you've got… all the little detail doubled, tripled, dripping down the mix, but the body of the thing basically the same and no sustain, just a couple of delay taps in real close…

I'm not Billy and Terry. Since I'm Chris, I'll fess up: that's exactly what I did, and you can have it in Hombre. It's two calibrated delay taps, which you can tweak a little, and if you bring them in you'll thicken and diffuse your tones without altering where the lows sit, or adding much in the way of extra sustain. It'll be punchy and get out of the way like reverb won't, but it'll be fatter and juicier than the dry signal. This is my interpretation of the ZZ Top secret sauce, or at least one of 'em, implemented in software rather than acoustics.

I'll never know how close I came, because them Texas boys don't tell tales out of school. But Hombre is my humble offering for a simple plugin that brings a little mojo to what would otherwise be a dry voice or guitar… and it won't muddy things up, just grease 'em a little.

If you like me being out there thinking up ideas like this and taking on the great mysteries of the audio world, please support my Patreon, just a dollar or two per person so it doesn't get too much like riverboat gambling and high rolling. I'll keep on being a thinkin' fool, and putting out cute little tricks like this one. Hope you find it handy: it might be the easiest way to throw in two tight quick echoes, one in phase and one out, because I'm not aware of anyone else facilitatin' specifically that. Well, now there is!

Thankee. (chrisj will become un-Texan in three, two, one…)

[Halonmusic]

Cool effect Chris. Will see myself using this.

[jinxtigr]

Cool effect Chris. Will see myself using this.

I bet it has uses waaaaay outside guitars

[Slaapstadseun]

Thankee podner... mighty kind of yer...

[Halonmusic]

Cool effect Chris. Will see myself using this.

I bet it has uses waaaaay outside guitars

I sure will use it on other things

[sfxsound3]

So I read the description several times - carefully - and did not understand what the two parameters are doing.

My guess:
Voicing - delay time and filter shape
Intensity - feedback and filter shape (a different one)

Am I wrong?

How long are the delay times - from min. to max.?

[metalifuxx]

I was just thinking about something like this while listening to Pink Floyd and some of Gilmour's over driven guitar tones, in the car the last week. Not the smooth soaring fuzz lead sounds or the liquid cleans he gets that are usually coated in modulation or delay. Its the more solo'd blues riffs that are relatively dry where you hear him really dig in. I was thinking there's a sort of short resonance or very short delay thats made with a speaker/mic "tiny room inside a room" (or your sound "acoustics fort" as you call it) thing that gives these more naked guitar parts in certain sections a real thick fat sound coming from his Strat. Like in "Have A Cigar", parts in "Money", and "Dogs"/"Pigs"/Sheep. Leave it to none other than Alan Parsons to be behind some sort of sound experimentation trickery though.

[jinxtigr]

So I read the description several times - carefully - and did not understand what the two parameters are doing.

My guess:
Voicing - delay time and filter shape
Intensity - feedback and filter shape (a different one)

Am I wrong?

Eyup.

Voicing is only delay time on two different delay taps.
Intensity is literally dry/wet, and there's no feedback at all. The reason it doesn't sound like one delay tap is because it's two (and because full-wet isn't necessarily 'no dry': it's all calibrated to go from 'dry' to 'too much'). I'm pretty sure full intensity is just reducing dry to equal strength with the other taps, and it's not meant to do that, it's designed to work as a more subtle seasoning.

[Halonmusic]

Hey Chris. Will we see a synth in the future?

[jinxtigr]

Hey Chris. Will we see a synth in the future?

You're more likely to see stuff for the open synth platform, Axoloti

I have four Axoloti boards. Though right now I'm totally booked with denormalization fixes for my library of free plugins, I'm yearning to get creative with the Axolotis. This may not even involve coding directly for them, or making 'plugin stompboxes' on the platform: one thing I noticed is that there are a lot of 'specialist' module coders making amazing oscillators, or filters, or envelopes etc for Axoloti. There's already a big range of tone-producers there.

So, I might instead be assembling synth builds based on Axoloti, with Airwindows-style approachable controls (interactive under the hood so you get useful behavior out of a few knobs) to do dedicated things like plucks or basses. I've been thinking of how to do a sequenced FM bass that's also modular-y (many parameters input in analog style) and there are some great ways to tack on analog components…

For purely softsynths, three things: one, it would require me to halt for a while (possibly months) to get up to speed. That's dangerous, I'm half-starving already and stopping is not good. Two, if I did do that I'm pretty sure it'd be VST only because it would be twice as hard to also pick up the ways to do an AU instrument, and three, I'm down on softsynths currently because I'm a lot more interested in using tech like Axoloti to produce music systems with an analog component. I think people (esp. in EDM) should be using synths and sound generators which have internal sequencers, time them off a central MIDI/DINsync clock, and then mix 'em analog. For the last year or so I've been gearing up to try this workflow in earnest, and teach people how to do it (using accessible gear, ideally DIY, and not 'boutique DINsync boxes costing thousands of dollars')

One challenge there is getting a testbed built for Axoloti that allows this sequencing. I gotta design the software, and the interface (hopefully off of pretty simple knobs and buttons), and make it buildable by regular people. Axoloti as it stands is a super-high-quality very vanilla board, with bunches of spots where you can solder stuff on there, but you need a schematic and the wires and pots and buttons and it'll get fiddly. The board right now is 65 euros and out of stock on their website.

I expect to build some of my Axoloti creations and eBay 'em while also giving full instructions (or videos showing how I did it, or both). So it will be possible to buy an Airwindows synth, but there's much I have to sort out first before that's a thing, and it might end up pricey if a lot of people like and want the stuff I hand-build. I've been torn between using a more wood, hand-carved style, or Hammond aluminum enclosures like a proper stompbox maker. There's also the consideration of what kinds of analog circuits I'd be driving: effectively it'd be about both making the Axo synth to flash the board with, and then powering a whole outboard circuit design that produces the rest of the sound.

After all, the Axoloti is fully capable of driving external control voltages at about 2K sample rate not counting two analog outs (which I think are full audio bandwidth) so it should be possible to make a hybrid synth, or hook it up to Eurorack gear, or both

Compared to that, and considering the cost of the platform (when it's in stock), I can't get that excited about softsynths…