Airwindows ConsoleLA: Free Mac/Windows/Linux/Pi AU/VST/Rack

[jinxtigr]

TL;DW: ConsoleLA is the Airwindows take on the Quad Eight console.

ConsoleLA.zip(1M)

APIs and Neves and MCI, oh my… well, ConsoleLA emulates the most incredible console you've never heard of. This thing was the sound of LA in the seventies. It's on the back cover of Steely Dan records, it's been seen in Tom Scholz's basement, and it's heard even on classic 70s LA and Hollywood and San Francisco records it didn't make… because it's the production model of a whole lineage of West Coast custom recording consoles with similar designs and circuitry. And you can still get them, apparently, the company lives… but I don't know where, or for how much, or how, as there's no sign of prices or any way to get them. There's none on Reverb, Vintage King doesn't have any, good luck even finding channel strips…

Meet the Quad Eight.

This sound echoes through the Seventies. Tons of Steely Dan, tons of Zappa, Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell… that's not even counting the wilder sightings, like when people figured this console mixed The Wall, or hearing it on Yes's Relayer album. The thing is, this was THE big production console before the days of Neve and API and SSL. Quad Eight were the first to go into production and come up with a recording console that you could just buy, set up, and use. Before them, you had to build your own.

Quad Eight were (are, since the website says they can still make you gear) supplying the film industry, and it shows. These desks are amazing at making movies for your ears. (in the Zappa phrase, on the Hot Rats album, which was done at the Whitney studios in Glendale the year before they got a Neve, so that album was likely also Quad Eight or a kindred West Coast console)

ConsoleLA, like ConsoleMC before it, is a bit of a different approach to emulating these great old dinosaurs, some still things you could conceivably find and have, some forever lost. The thing is, this is the nearest thing to custom point-to-point wiring of discrete transistors. On top of that, the Quad Eight ran a higher supply voltage than anybody: negative 28 to positive 28 volts, for enormous energy and headroom. The way to get these sounds is not layer upon layer of 'digital emulation' but trying to get the behaviors right with minimal, atypical algorithms. Only then can you get the energy and sonority of the real Quad Eight.

The filtering is a whole other thing from the MCI. No mid peak here. The slopes are more gradual, but you can cut the hell out of the mids, and the deeper into the Seventies we got, the deeper the midrange cuts became. What I've done with ConsoleLA is try to make the simplest, most approachable Console system that can get the widest range of sounds as heard on these records, and reward you when you pursue music-recording in the old school, human way.

This doubtless won't be the last, but it might just end up being my favorite. I hope you like ConsoleLA

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

[Agreed]

I look forward to checking it out. I just keep my Patreon sub to you going full time - I hate subscriptions when they're forced on you, but glad to subscribe in that way to do my small part to help keep development going. Some of your tools make it into nearly every project I do.

[jinxtigr]

If anybody's hurting and my Xmas present to you is letting the patreon drop for a time with my blessing, then please know that you can do that. The last couple months I've just been in dev-land and not getting any new hardware since, I guess the last one was the Bricasti and we'll be seeing more from that. I am right now grinding away on reverb algorithm generation seeing if I can beat what I've previously got for the 'Sunset Chamber' type of space, and my bills are paid and I even feel kind of sort of safe? in terms of that?

So by all means if you're doing okay and like getting new things like ConsoleLA (they don't all have to be good, the good ones have to be good ) then join my patreon, but if my gift to you should be cutting you some slack when other bills you've got WON'T give you a break, let me show how I'm different from 'subscriptions' by giving you stuff without expecting anything back for a while. It's xmas, why shouldn't I look to give stuff to people I care about?

[Wrong Eq]

How did you model the console and how do you know it's authentic, assuming you do not have the original that you could do measurements on ? Do you have the original schematics ?

[ampetrosillo]

How did you model the console and how do you know it's authentic, assuming you do not have the original that you could do measurements on ? Do you have the original schematics ?

He just wings it essentially. Does it sound like the real thing? I have *no* idea. Probably not (it employs waveshaping + "antiwaveshaping" to essentially, erm, "differentially saturate" the mix. No real console does that. The closest thing to this would be a compander). The EQ curves are just imagined out of thin air, it appears. Does all of this matter? Maybe.

IME, Airwindows Console<version number> has a pleasing, if slight, effect. The big drawback is that it only really works well post-fader, and to do that, lots of DAWs need to resort to clumsy workarounds. The other big drawback is inherent to the lack of oversampling in any Airwindows plugin, while this kind of processing really calls for it (unless you decide to work at higher sample rates). I did a couple of projects using Console 7 and Console 8, and honestly they are a pain to use.

If you use Ardour or Mixbus to mix (and IIRC also Cubase) these plugins are really drag and drop, set and forget, because these Draws feature post-fader FX. In Reaper you might get around the lack of post-fader FX by showing the internal fader control on the track panel but you lose control of the native faders.

[Wrong Eq]

Probably not (it employs waveshaping + "antiwaveshaping" to essentially, erm, "differentially saturate" the mix. No real console does that.

According to Chris, it mimics the impedance and summing behaviour of consoles which no other emulation does. You can read about it here: https://www.airwindows.com/console2/

Really weird to burry the core idea of the console plugins so deep that no one ever gets it. But maybe it's all nonsense, I don't know. I like the sound of these plugins tho.

By the way if it's to complicated to set everything up you can simply set up a summing mixer within your daw and route everything into it. That way you can circumvent the whole mess with sends and pre/post faders etc.

[mothra]

How did you model the console and how do you know it's authentic, assuming you do not have the original that you could do measurements on ? Do you have the original schematics ?

I'll have to give it a run this weekend. I'm VERY familiar with the Quad Eight.. A friend of mine's dad has always based his own preamps off it too, for some reason he LOVES that console (he's the one that designed A-Designs 'Ventura' preamp, and named it after the city we lived in hah)

[dikrek]

Probably not (it employs waveshaping + "antiwaveshaping" to essentially, erm, "differentially saturate" the mix. No real console does that.

According to Chris, it mimics the impedance and summing behaviour of consoles which no other emulation does. You can read about it here: https://www.airwindows.com/console2/

Really weird to burry the core idea of the console plugins so deep that no one ever gets it. But maybe it's all nonsense, I don't know. I like the sound of these plugins tho.

By the way if it's to complicated to set everything up you can simply set up a summing mixer within your daw and route everything into it. That way you can circumvent the whole mess with sends and pre/post faders etc.

These plugins can help if you have a lot of tracks to mix.

I admit I haven’t strictly followed the post-fader rule.

I use Sonimus N-Console for every channel, then the same in buss mode for the master.

This deals with all the initial gain staging - I use the Sonimus VU meters for this and have the default instance of N-Console default to an automatic reduction in gain for my material’s average needs. I tune after that of course.

Then I put in the Airwindows console at the end of the chain per channel, and first in the master (so the Sonimus one in the master is just after Airwindows).

I track at 48 KHz for speed. And mix in 96KHz. That way I engage the ultrasonic filtering in the Console (it won’t engage at something like 48KHz).

I don’t lose too much sleep over whether I touch the DAW faders this way.

whether you’ve adjusted levels before of after the plugin - how could it possibly matter? Chris has tried to explain it but I never understood it.

Levels are already modified BEFORE it hits Console<x>Channel, for example, via Sonimus in my case.