Airwindows kPlateA: Free Mac/Windows/Linux/Pi AU/VST/Rack (a plate reverb substitute!)

[jinxtigr]

TL;DW: kPlateA is a plate reverb, not unlike its namesake atop Abbey Road

kPlateA.zip(624k)

So I just happened to turn my efforts to plate reverbs last week, since the internet exploded over some plugin drama and some of the plugins in question just happened to be models of some specific plate reverbs in a famous place: atop Abbey Road Studios. There were four of them, and I'm sure I can't make a plugin to model those exact ones, as the rights to the name are probably all tied up. And I wouldn't suggest that I tried to make reverb plugins MORE realistic than those made by this company with rights to the name. That would be rude!

But I bet nothing is stopping me from making plugins and using the LETTER. And indeed nothing is stopping me from finding examples of dry sound and then the sound of these other plugins, and using that as a reference to the lettered EMT plate reverb on top of Abbey Road, or indeed figuring out that this other company rather overprocessed its stuff and finding ways to get a similar effect that's cleaner, deeper and more intense.

It's actually a really interesting puzzle to do this sort of thing… especially when you don't really have good reference yet, as it's all happening so fast. But now you have kPlateA. And in it, you might just have a new best plate reverb. It's using multiple fancy Householder feedforward matrices, all sorts of filtering, undersampling to make it useable at 96k and 192k, and seeing as it was developed on my antique Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard, I daresay it both sounds better and runs better than its competition.

Oh, one more thing: you get to own it. And by that I mean, not only do you get it maintained and supported for free (thanks to a thriving Patreon and those who help me), but it is also MIT-licensed open source code. So you get to own it, in the sense of you can take the code and skin it with a big GUI with pictures of plate reverbs with funny waves drawn on them, if you feel that is really necessary. You just have to credit Airwindows.

Or, you may find that the way this can sit in the mix, means the GUI with pictures of plate reverbs with funny waves drawn on them, isn't really as necessary as you thought it was

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
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All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.
VCV Rack module

[af20001]

Thanks Chris, sounds great. At this rate I'll be upping my Patreon payment.

[jinxtigr]

Thanks Chris, sounds great. At this rate I'll be upping my Patreon payment.

That's welcome because it puts me closer to my committment to get a Bricasti M7 and start making reverbs based on the sounds of that: there are some very popular settings on the M7 and I'm excited both to use it and to study it

The next kPlate (B) ought to be even better for some things. I''m taking the whole entire Householder matrices (both the verb, and the allpass network for plateyness) and coming up with unique ones for each reverb and plate. It's producing really distinct sounds.

I think some reverbs, including the ones that motivated this line of plugins, are just using the same basic algo reverb each time, but due to some other tech I wrote using the Godot engine, I get to have completely unique engines for each verb now. Didn't used to, the ones before this tended to use the same engine and just use it differently, but now everything is bespoke. I'll demonstrate when I do the next video