TL;DW: XLowpass is a distorted digital EQ, inspired by retro sampler DSP.
XLowpass.zip(572k)
Welcome to the Airwindows journey into vintage sampler land! This might prove to be a long journey, but every journey starts with a first step.
Maybe the first step was Mackity and MackEQ: hardware mixer emulations. (that's not necessarily done, either: it's the 1202, beloved to French House music, that I did, but the DnB-hounds liked the 8-buss.) But the follow-up is just the sort of thing I might want to look into: certain of the E-mu Z-plane filters. Apparently not even the really fancy stuff… but the way that the simple lowpasses and highpasses would distort when you abused them. And it seems nobody's that interested in exploring that, because these are not analog filters or particularly sought-after, except by those in the know.
And we know some stuff about them, because the information is out there… but a lot of devs don't think of them as interesting. They're biquads, with hard clipping inside the EQ code, and implemented in certain ways for efficiency: and if you can have properly made stock DAW filters, why would you want lower-bit calculation or clipping or stuff like that?
XLowpass… is NOT the end destination. There will be more like it but the X series of Airwindows filters (handy to look up in the plugin list) are NOT the carefully tailored E-mu emulation (or at least tone-alike, to the best of my ability?) XLowpass is getting familiar with the CONCEPT, an internally distorted multi-stage biquad and how I can manipulate it to get sounds out of it. It's not meant to itself sound like an E-mu e6400 (that being the sampler I have, so far), but it's a plugin that can dial in a whole range of the craziness people had to go to a lot of trouble to do in the real sampler (internal distorting and so on). And you can run it into Mackity and see whether you're within striking distance of some of the more gnarly DnB tones that belonged to the 90s, seemingly lost to time.
And when the Y series comes out, things will be even more off the hook, because Y stands for "WHY would you DO that?!?" and it means I do the same thing, except with wavefolding on the internal distortion. So those should get GNARLY.
And then when I get to work on the eventual ZLowpass etc, and stack them up against real Z-plane hardware (note, however, I will not be cloning the algorithms, I am just going to try and get the tone the same), then I'll have some practice under my belt.
All this is brought to you by my Patreon, and by LOTS of popular demand I've agreed that rather than dedicating everything above $2k a month to donating CMOS chips and electronic parts to those wanting to DIY, I've agreed to save up for bigger and more spectacular/desirable samplers and things, in order to make plugins of them. It'll take me a while to save up for say a SP1200, but people would really like me to attempt that sort of thing, so why not? Gives me more goals to shoot for.
In the Airwindows community department, there's been something new about the Airwindows Chord Slide Rule I posted. You can still print out one of your own using my PDF, but Aykut Cirik thought it would be a fun idea to make a webpage that works like the Slide Rule, so you can use it on your phone. So as long as the link holds, you can go to https://www.trinity.be/airwindows_chordsliderule/ and have a quick reference to the Slide Rule as a webpage. Thank you, Aykut!
