Airwindows Kalman: Free Mac/Windows/Linux/Pi AU/VST/Rack
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- Опубліковано 7 жов 2024
- www.airwindows... / airwindows
So… come with me, if you will, on this journey.
There's a huge amount of audacious Airwindowsness that hinges on this little bit of code that was never meant to work for audio purposes. This isn't just from finance or science, it's literally from GPS satellites and their care and feeding.
Meet Kalman. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has this as an audio filter up to now. And now you do, and you're staring at it going 'wait, what?', and rightly so. At first glance this ticks none of the boxes, and then it sounds awful.
What's happening? Kalman is 'filtering', but really it's trying to predict a 'real' position from what it sees as hopelessly noisy data. The thing is, it's the audio input data. None of it is 'wrong' in any sense. In other situations I go to great lengths to preserve every detail, and here Kalman is, trying to get rid of 'mistakes' that aren't even mistakes.
However, this is also how Air3 got its amazing ability to extract or suppress the air band. So what happens when you're sweeping it from the highs right down through the midrange, into bass and beyond?
Bad things. It neither knows nor cares what a frequency is, or whether it's producing a filter slope. Really, it's not. It's producing wavelike outputs like it was charting a GPS course and only roughly correlating them to audio frequencies. It won't produce sharp breaks in its curve, but the farther you go down, the more its 'steering' will interfere with the audio, producing a sort of grinding, overbearing solidity, like the audio was freezing solid or turning to stone.
This is not even an audio filter, remember. I'm sure anyone who's tried this, abandoned it, immediately, because you set it to full-wet and it immediately sounds awful.
More fools they!
This thing is best experienced not as a synth-style filter, not some sweepable musical thing, but as a crossover. You can hear either it, or on the 'inv' setting, its opposite. You can subtract its output from the dry signal, and then recombine them again. Works just fine in fact. And that's where things get really interesting.
Full wet produces this unbearably heavy, petrifyingly solid, unyielding sound. Up higher it's an exaggerated version of the Air3 roll-off. It makes everything dead, weighty, even when higher frequencies burst through in artifacts it's like they're the bones of the sound you started with. It's a really strong texture.
When you subtract it, you've got this hot, lively, aggressive texture. It's fiery, energetic, a little like my old plugin Cojones which identified unpredictable elements in the sound in the treble regions. This will do it at any tonal range: I'd say frequency, but the whole effect defies frequency. You can have opposite tone colors with your opposite frequency ranges: low/stone, high/fire. At the extremes, the effect is so aggressive it's disruptive and sounds broken and wrong.
And then… just blend them more subtly, and Kalman shows what it's really for.
When both elements are present (in this one, it's inv/wet settings that are near the center and mostly dry, but it'd also work as Fire/Stone faders meant to stay mostly balanced) you can lean the whole texture in different directions across an amazingly wide range of basic tonality. You can fool with just the deep subs, making them monumental or leaning them out. You can darken abrasive upper mids, or mid-mids, or, heck, lower mids if you like. Above the range will be more or less Fire, below will be more or less Stone. The range, however, will never be just an isolated 'cutoff frequency' because the whole thing completely transforms that whole range.
If you can transform how you hear away from 'frequency' and hear things in terms of texture, you can apply sound changes completely unattainable by normal filtering, no matter how complex. And the neat thing is, since it's a form of crossover, it excels at subtlety. And since the range options (shown here as simply 'Kalman') are so wide, you can transform texture of all sorts, not just 'stone = heavy = weight = bass'. Heck no! You can adjust a piano to have weightier low midrange if you like, or take a drum room sound and make everything over the bass frequencies more fiery. You can take a big guitar amp, crank the weight, and then just sneak up the Kalman knob until the brutality of the lows are undeniable.
There will be more like this, as seen in the video. But Kalman is here now. You're welcome to begin playing with it. If it fights you, don't give up on it too easy. You might be able to do more with less. I think in many cases that inv/wet control is going to hover nearly exactly halfway. It won't take much to get this plugin doing obvious texture shaping. The rest is up to you…
I’ve wondered what a kalman filter sounded like applied to sound! Very cool, chris. Excited to hear air/fire/stone controls.
Wonder no more: now you have it, and I'll bring the air/fire/stone thing along as quickly as I can. Gotta see if it actually works and is good first :)
airwindows has no bugs, only (undocumented) futures
Chris is making highpass filters interesting again
HF MAGA
2 notes after playing with it in Bespoke for a while:
1. The wet and inverted signal don't combine back into the dry signal, had to separately invert one of them for that to work, using the Bespoke inverter plugin. Not sure if it's a Bespoke issue, just letting you know.
2. Chaining multiple instances of Kalman gives weird and wonderful results. If ever you need to rush something out, maybe Kalman2 with a kind of "Poles" variable might be cool.
Remember inv/wet on a filter-esque plugin means 'lowpass, and also you get highpass'. It is not simply 'inverted but same', it's 'inverted and anything below halfway ALSO has full dry, so it is the subtraction of wet from dry'. I think every inv/wet I've ever done is like this. Otherwise it would be 'why did I even include that when it doesn't sound any different' :)
@@airwindows That's why I was wondering. I used it as a crossover, to process highs and lows separately, but the low- and highpass (2 instances of Kalman, both set to the same "frequency", one full and wet and one full dry) didn't combine back into the dry signal until I inverted the phase of one of the instances. It may be a Bespoke thing, but when I tried it, inv was not just dry minus wet, it was dry minus wet but phase inverted.
It sounds like if you do want to use it as a crossover to have separate paths, you figured out the correct way to do that :)
This is awesome, Chris. Sounds so natural in a weird way. I know this is only a component of ConsoleX - which sounds incredible - for now, but could this sort of algorithm be applied to other kinds of filters? Could it be made into a bandpass/range filter with the same beautiful artifacts around the edges? Maybe even a notch filter? And will you at some point make a Kalman2 that covers the whole frequency spectrum?
Absolutely loving the recent experimental and in-between plugins. Really looking forward to discontinuity.
Pretty sure I can't do just any old thing to it: the lower section will be the Stone, the upper the Fire, no matter what you do. No notch filter, not exactly a bandpass and unsure of how that'd even work, certainly it can't be a tight notch OR resonant peak as that's not how any of this works. But it covers a pretty broad range, you know., Subsonic to 'up in the high mids and treble'.
@@airwindows Thanks for the quick explanation! Really looking forward to ConsoleX or the separate Stone/Fire/Air plugin then.
Sounds like a really promising direction.
Console X will be cool. You can find the crunch, adjust the freq, and invert. What a great way to mix. I can hear it already. reminds me of a transistor amp with three band EQ for some reason. Maybe not because it sounds the same but I can hear it the same. Go Chris, Go! You are on fire lately. I can't wait to see your take on metering and I wish you good luck on the VST3 thing.
Air3 is a perfect complement for Air2.
I gotta try putting this in the feedback chain of a delay...
Very interesting stuff!
Looks like a great plugin for kal-ibrating our audio! (sorry)
Fascinating and cool
Fantastic!
thank you !
Chris, is there anyway you could make a version of this new fire/air/stone typology without the post fader necessities of your console system? The post fader thing doesn’t gel with my workflow, but I really want to get deep into the 3-“band” textural controls you’ve envisioning.
Noted. That seems like a very reasonable ask :) in fact maybe I should immediately do this for next week. Stay tuned. Anybody else want that? Comment.
:::makes an alt account to comment that I also want that:::
@@airwindowsbtw I just threw this onto a test bed track and it was surprisingly, exceedingly useful on the bass
Don't worry about it, I got inspired and ran out and made exactly that, for next week. You are the first to be told :)
@@airwindows woot woot! I’d been tuning into streams here and there to see if it might be happening but missed this exciting development. Thank you so much!
And good luck with the juce stuff!
how the hell do you think of this stuff?
you're a genius!
Haven't played with this yet, but I noticed that you applied this to a complicated track that sounded nicely mixed, with different elements and textures fitting together almost like a finished track. So does this filter give better results on complex mixed sources? If someone had a crunchy guitar solo track and ran this over it will it bring out different textures and the same magical eq alchemy or will it produce less satisfying results with less granular diversity to grab and highlight from? (I will probably be finding out fairly soon on my own but would love to hear people's experiences.)
No, I actually think it'll shine on individual tracks way better :) that said, I'm planning to integrate it with ConsoleX so every stage has its own Air/Fire/Stone controls, letting you get effects much like just applying it on the master buss.