Airwindows Slew4: Free Mac/Windows/Linux/Pi CLAP/AU/VST3/VST2/LV2/Rack

[jinxtigr]

TL;DW: Slew4 is tape compression without the tape, for brightness control.

Slew4.zip (542k) standalone(AU, VST2)
Slew4 in Airwindows Consolidated (a separate project) under 'Brightness' (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

You've heard of a cat without a grin and a grin without a cat, and you've heard of plenty of tape plugins without tape compression… but how about the compression without the tape?

Slew4 does just one thing, but it does it incredibly well. It finds digital edges and glare and high frequency tizz, and it wipes out JUST that, to whatever extent you like, using new filtering ideas I don't think have been used before in this way. The Airwindows Slew plugins have long been a secret weapon for just this purpose, but this takes it completely beyond anything I had.

That's why this is the technology in TapeHack2, and what got included in ConsoleH and ConsoleX2 as hasty updates soon after they came out, and why it's a significant part of ToTape9 which I'm doing everything I can to finish up. Now it's there for you to use and control, without any sort of saturation stage or any other sort of tape modeling, in its purest possible form.

One thing that means is, if your sound isn't bright enough, there is no chance you'll ever hear it do anything. With the right kind of vocal track this is a de-esser all by itself. For other vocal tracks, even ones with pronounced esses, you'll find it does absolutely nothing. It ONLY cares about the very highest highs, and excises them so neatly you'd never know they were there.

Slew4 runs two samples of lookahead to do what it does, and makes its filter by stacking up averaging filters with even numbers of samples in them. These produce stopbands with big cancellation nodes in them, but when you stack them up, each new cancellation node targets a bump (between nodes) from the previous one… so it becomes a very steep roll-off with good filtering past the cutoff, and no pre-ripple meaning it has incredible time domain performance for something that steep. The strangeness of the stop-band response is probably why this wouldn't have found use before, but it turns out to sound fantastic, especially when it's just reining in the highest highs without touching anything else.

If you liked TapeHack2, you already like this! Enjoy playing with it as a dedicated brightness tamer

Airwindows Consolidated Download
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All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.

[woylie]

Love it Chris. One limitation is it's not easy to hear the delta (what is being "removed") in Reaper. Reaper has it's own delta button for all plugins, but because the plugin's 2-sample latency is not reported to Reaper it can't calculate the correct delta and you hear some of the dry signal. So would it possible to have a version of the plugin with a built-in delta? e.g. like the Inv/Dry in Everyslew? Or add plugin delay compensation (aka latency reporting)?

I look forward to ToTape9. I have a request on that front - in ToTape8, the head bump frequency values displayed do not accurately represent the peak of the bump. Could they be made to do so?

Cheers,
Dave

[VELLTONE MUSIC]

Thanks Chris,your stuff are top notch :)Cheers

[FrettedSynth]

Nice, thank you

[bangzero]

One limitation is it's not easy to hear the delta (what is being "removed") in Reaper. Reaper has it's own delta button for all plugins, but because the plugin's 2-sample latency is not reported to Reaper it can't calculate the correct delta and you hear some of the dry signal.

you can manually set the latency of a plugin in Reaper. can you set it to 2 samples as a workaround? edit: sorry. this is wrong.

[Dr.Gunjah]

How? I can't find any option to set the latency for a plugin. I think you can use the 'Time adjustment delay' JS plugin to correct the latency on track level, but that won't help with the delta function.

[bangzero]

i was wrong. thought you could set latency, but in fact you can only disable latency compensation. sorry for misinfo.

How? I can't find any option to set the latency for a plugin. I think you can use the 'Time adjustment delay' JS plugin to correct the latency on track level, but that won't help with the delta function.

[bangzero]

I think you can use the 'Time adjustment delay' JS plugin to correct the latency on track level, but that won't help with the delta function.

ps- you could use that plugin on track channels 3/4 to delay dry signal 2 samples and mix with 100% wet fx to get a compensated delta. but that's far from "easy".

[woylie]

I think you can use the 'Time adjustment delay' JS plugin to correct the latency on track level, but that won't help with the delta function.

ps- you could use that plugin on track channels 3/4 to delay dry signal 2 samples and mix with 100% wet fx to get a compensated delta. but that's far from "easy".

Thanks. The manual delta hack I came up with was to sent to a parallel track containing Slew4/polarity inversion/JS Time Adjustment Delay set to -2 samples.

I'm wondering whether this can truly be called a slew rate limiter. It's more a low pass filter (a very good/unique one) triggered by slew, rather than directly limiting the slew... the result being more gentle/musical than the obvious distortion of the direct slew rate limiters, and it also seems to kick in at very low settings a bit like a low threshold/low ratio compressor...

So maybe a good approach is two stages e.g. Golden Slew to tame the very worst high frequency spikes (strong control/distortion but only occasionally), followed by Slew4 to gently tame the rest of the top end. So a bit like using a clipper prior to a compressor.... or an 1176 into a LA2A etc. and if Chris wants to throw this idea in one plugin, my dream would be for it to have separate deltas for the two stages. It could be called Slew-Mo, Slew-zy, Slew-down or Slew-per-Sonic...