Airwindows

ZAcidLowpass

TL;DW: ZAcidLowpass is like if an e6400 went insane and grew shark teeth.

ZAcidLowpass in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘XYZ Filters’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
ZAcidLowpass.zip (522k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Okay, next week we can get normal :)

This algorithm is less than a week old. It’s what happened when I tried to extend my Quadratic Bezier Curve audio processing to Cubic Bezier Curve audio processing. And I’m not sure it’s time to give up on that, but in the meantime, the experiment failed spectacularly.

So, generating curves can follow various rules. The quadratic bezier curves are already breaking audio rules, as what they do has nothing to do with frequencies, or harmonics, or any audio concepts. They’re drawing a continuous curve directed by the sample values and it turned out this is possible, but it doesn’t have audio significance. It’s quite good at handling control voltages, like in a compressor! But it’s still kind of arbitrary, constructing a curve from the starting position of a previous sample.

The cubic bezier curves proved much less manageable.

In theory, you could get interesting results out of them since you get two independent control points, but it turned out weirder: there’s this tendency to draw the curves, indeed make them be interesting curves with striking contours, but then jump around in the reconstruction. It’d not-randomly space out the curves with tiny straight lines like a sawtooth wave gone mad. Very pretty but never joining up the waves into something smooth and connected. The idea was to see where the extra control point took the reconstruction, but at least for now it took the reconstruction to crazy-town.

And produced a horrible hybrid of a steep resonant ringy filter, and a ring modulator, and I don’t know what else. I never heard anything like that, and so there was only one thing to do.

Put the Z filters output stage on it so you could distort it wildly, and let people have it. What else?

The cutoff is roughly what you’d expect, a frequency control. Over gives you highpassing, under gives you lowpassing, both gives you the original sound (this is a sort of crossover! somehow!). Meltdown does a specific thing: rather than feeding the filter with an averaged, darker input, you can feed it with the raw audio input and get aliasing and chaos fed into the points and control voltages, and this sounds wilder and dirtier. If you’re using Over to produce highpassing, Meltdown is reversed, and setting it to 0 gives you the crazy overtones and harsh noises. Drive is like the other Z filters, and so is Output, and the distortion stage is the same as in the Z filters, so if you’re using those and would like a contrast that’s still tonally similar, this is the plugin for you.

They can’t all be ToTape9 :) if this suits you, have fun!

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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.

Date February 15, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

ChimeyGuitar2

TL;DW: ChimeyGuitar2 is a wilder ChimeyGuitar.

ChimeyGuitar2 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Amp Sims’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
ChimeyGuitar2.zip (525k) standalone(AU, VST2)

This is the Latest chimeyguitar plugin, but it is not going to be in the Basic or Recommended categories, though in my heart it is definitely Recommended. Why? Because it’s borderline dangerous. The amp can pop and explode when set incorrectly.

Still here? OK, let’s talk what’s different this time. The original ChimeyGuitar used many instances of BeziComp to compress, which was mostly good at clamping down and compressing the signal. If you overcompress, you get an unpleasant warbling, and it didn’t really react like traditional compressors. It’s pretty safe and ‘normal’ even while not being normal. It didn’t work great as ChimeyDeluxe, so I put a lot of work into developing a more intense version to use in ChimeyDeluxe, and that’s what came out.

An important difference is that ChimeyDeluxe is ten EQ-like controls with the compression built in. No extra boost, no dedicated compression control, no cab filters (I use the ones in ConsoleX2), so it’s inherently restricted. ChimeyDeluxe can go wild, but that’s when you’re cranking the sliders around and making wild variations between adjacent sliders. It doesn’t have… surprises.

ChimeyGuitar2 is the raw material of that with the cab filter and an unrestricted compression-speed control and an even more unrestricted boost control… so if you wanted to turn specifically ChimeyDeluxe into a monster, here you go.

Watch out for the boost: it will go up to total compressed squish, but if you push beyond that it can snap into a ‘blown output stage’ mode that kinda barks extra loud on the loudest notes. The filter section is much the same as ChimeyGuitar, as is the cab filtering. But, remember the gain staging of this plugin includes any gain boosts inside the filtering, It should behave any time the combined gains don’t add up to infinite, but they multiply by each other so this is NOT a plugin for cranking things out carelessly. Think of it like a Dumble tube amp: go carefully and you won’t hurt yourself, but it can scare you if you’re careless.

The compression speed is the key to a lot of interestingly messy tones. It’s a different compression than the version in ChimeyGuitar, which just turns down and has that funny warbling effect when pushed. This one doesn’t warble like that, but it includes makeup gain so infinite sustain is very possible, and if you do that with a fast (to the left) compression speed, you get a distinct distortion type, an edge on the tone that’s very distortionlike. Pulling gain back or slowing (to the right) the compression speed moderates this effect, and slowing the speed a LOT is what you need to do to really avoid distorty qualities. That, and back off on the boost slider up top.

But what fun is that? So, if you’re going to embrace the wildness, dial in the gain with the speed set faster. Remember the EQ bands multiply with this. Once you’re in the zone, tweak the compression speed to shape the voicing of the distorty stuff, and if gain is high enough and you’re pushing the system hard enough, you can make the ‘bark’ touch responsive with very tiny adjustments right around the infinite compression point, right where it starts to bark and spark.

Or you can always use a normal amp sim if this seems like too much trouble. A normal person wouldn’t deal with this nonsense. I need to spend more time playing with it, because when I got reacquainted with ChimeyGuitar2 I immediately wanted to dial in all the twitchiest settings and play leads through it :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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.

Date February 8, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

DeNoise

TL;DW: DeNoise can work as a multiband gate and as a wild effect.

DeNoise in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Noise’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
DeNoise.zip (522k) standalone(AU, VST2)

So it starts as a multiband gate. That’s pretty direct. You’ve got frequency ranges, and when they’re set to zero there’s no gating and full wet is the same as dry. Turn up a band, and you’re increasing the threshold: when the sound at that band drops below the threshold it gates and there’s silence. You can use the dry/wet control to moderate the effect a little, and you can dial in settings that neatly denoise a sound without interfering with the main audio too much.

The speed control governs how rapidly it transitions, and increasing that slows the reaction time, so you can keep the gate from chattering, set it as quick as possible without an obvious click and you’re good. On top of that there’s a trick from DeCrackle that’s part of the dry/wet: the same as DeCrackle, if you set it full dry rather than just bypassing it, what you get is the delta function with dry subtracted from the result. This isn’t the same as an inv/wet control so I didn’t label it that: it’s a special case for ‘monitor only what’s being taken away’ which is sometimes handy for stuff like this.

And now, we get freaky with it :)

When you raise the gating a lot farther than mere noise gating, you get into some aggressive sound sculpting very quickly. Since it’s a gate, you’re shortening everything, but since it’s multiband it can wrench the tone around. Instead of cutting low mids on the sound, you can gate them out super aggressively and it’ll shorten and tighten up a kick, but keep the low mids as part of the attack: you’re basically handling the decay of every part differently. You can have the bands blend across different settings, or have adjacent bands very different from each other, and all these things twist and mutate the tone.

And then once you’re doing that, the speed control comes into play. It governs both how fast the gate can slam shut, and how quick it can open, and that’s also relative to the frequency of the band, so exaggerate this and you get filter-sweepy effects. Adjusting this can lock in exact gatey tones really well, it should be obvious where Speed wants to be set. And of course if that’s not enough for you, you can make a tone entirely out of the Delta, where it loses all the attacks and keeps only the decays being gated off…

And, it’s one of the more CPU-efficient Airwindows plugins so it does all that while barely touching your CPU.

It should be fun, as well as useful in the normal way. Hope you like it :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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.

Date February 1, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

kWoodRoom

TL;DW: kWoodRoom is a small wooden performing space.

kWoodRoom in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
kWoodRoom.zip (604k) standalone(AU, VST2)

This concludes a series of plugin releases around Xmas and thereabouts! First there was ChimeyDeluxe, then ConsoleX2 with a bit of music to go along with it, and now the final shoe to drop is the unreleased reverb that was used to make what was seemingly a Dead show from 1972 or so!

kWoodRoom was more stumbled upon than searched for. I’m continuing to pursue reverb things, doing better and better at delivering a really convincing virtual place to be in, but kWoodRoom popped up when searching for something else, and it’s the last example of where my reverb work stood in 2025.

It’s got all the same controls as recent Airwindows reverbs, and it’s the tone that is unusual. From the first instant I heard it I went ‘oh hey a wood paneled room, that’s weird’. It didn’t seem special in any other way, didn’t max out any of the things I was aiming for, but there it was, sounding like a thing. I’ve learned to pay attention to that, especially when there’s no real explanation for it.

That’s because the reverbs I make search through hundreds of millions of possible delay time options to find optimal settings that balance many different requirements. They’re purely Householder matrixes using comb filters alone, and relying upon matrix size to produce a smooth sound… unless I’m guiding them towards a rough sound, or a sound like a series of concrete arches, or what have you. I get to seek out all kinds of different qualities in the countless hours of computer time spent running genetic algorithms and permutations of delay lines.

And then in the middle of all that, there’ll be a kWoodRoom, more recognized than created. It just had a personality. Will it be a personality you like? I don’t know, but if you give it a shot you will probably hear what it’s like right away, and then it’s up to you :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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.

Date January 25, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 11 Comments

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ZAcidLowpass

ChimeyGuitar2

DeNoise

kWoodRoom

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