Airwindows DeRez3: Free Mac/Windows/Linux/Pi CLAP/AU/VST3/VST2/LV2/Rack

https://www.airwindows.com/derez3/   / airwindows  

I've long been interested in old school lo-fi digital.

It's partly because I've had ancient reverbs and things, stuff that produced a vibe far better than newer replacements, and it's partly because all my own efforts have been so much the opposite: working out how to dither 32-bit floating point and using it in all plugins, turning to 96k sampling rate and working out distributed filtering so the processing can be simpler than the wild overprocessing of oversampling: I've gone farther and farther towards ultra-resolution and learned how to adapt it musically so it doesn't just sound super-DAW-y and clinical.

But all the time, I've known of the great retro samplers. Some I've even bought, but not really known what to do with, a rock/prog guy like me. Some are out of my range and I can't afford them. I've even picked up some seminal records done with old samplers like that, or discovered they played a role in stuff I loved.

And then I started trying to improve on my undersampling for reverbs… and made a breakthrough that changed everything.

You see, when I undersample a reverb, I'm taking a sample only every two or four samples, and interpolating the result to give a high output sample rate. I've been sticking to exactly 2x or 4x sampling rate, and doing a linear reconstruction: you can hear what that sounds like in CrunchCoat, which is also fun to play with… but in essence it's taking the idea of interpolating, and going 'let's just take a reverb sample every X samples. What's X? Anything!'

So you got to swoop the reverb down to a gritty, low-fi mess. So far so good (or bad: but that's the point, it was called 'cursed retro digital' by my livestream and obviously I had to put it out as a plugin) But then, what would you do if you had a sequence of lo-fi samples, irregularly spaced, and you wanted to draw a smooth line through them, not a pointy line?

Graphics has a handy technique called Bezier curves. It lets you draw a smooth line between points. Depending on the Bezier curve, you might go through the points, or around them, depending on how you set it up. But the important thing is, it's not an audio calculation. The higher harmonics you might generate have nothing to do with the sound. It doesn't know it is a sound. It's just trying to draw the seamless, smoothest curve between some points.

Initial experiments with the reverbs went strangely. It would act like a cursed brickwall filter, but with a strange resonance unlike anything I'd heard before. In the ballpark, but always ruining the cleanness of the reverb and making horrible (but very smooth) artifacts… until I hit on using perfectly even divisors of the sample rate and that got me a plugin called CreamCoat and a whole batch of new reverbs I'm already beginning to use for everything.

But then… what happened to the horrible but very smooth artifacts? The Bezier curve reconstruction that isn't so careful to sound nice, that throws out strange artifacts never before experienced, but always very mellow and smooth like some kind of cursed brickwall or isolator filter?

Meet DeRez3. That's your Rate control. Unlike CrunchCoat it doesn't click when taken to zero, largely because it just goes to subsonics and never really to zero so it can't trap energy by mistake. Every parameter is control-smoothed because I expect this thing to be played like a synth filter… It's got a Rez control that's tweaked so at extreme low bit, it throws in a gating behavior that can be used in conjunction with the Rate to produce strange gatey effects on sounds. It's got a Dry/Wet that is actually set up like my Wetness controls: with full dry you can sneak in small amounts of DeRez without affecting dry level, with full wet you can sneak in traces of dry without cutting wet level. 0.5 gives you both.

This is an alternate way of dialing in those retro digital sounds without 'emulation' of all that analog stuff. No added noise, no simulated analog stages. Instead, it is the refinement of a concept for reconstructing lo-fi using Bezier curves, and only gets better the more rez you've got to hold it. 96k, double precision? Bring it on, it will just further optimize the vibe being produced by the algorithm. It's HI-FI low-fi.