Airwindows

VerbSevens

TL;DW: VerbSevens is a calibrated reference reverb plugin for reverb matrices.

VerbSevens.zip (619k) standalone(AU, VST2)
VerbSevens in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

Here’s a tool I use often, updated to keep pace with where my development’s been heading. (also, a person brought up something happening with VerbSixes that I could make better, but I doubt he expected THIS much better)

For years now, I’ve been developing reverbs along specific lines. I’ve never been a fan of allpass filters, unless they’re MV (my take on a classic bloom effect that’s made only out of allpass filters). I think they’re smeary and don’t actually sound deep, just blurred. I want to be able to make reverbs out of only comb filters, out of only delays, because that’s what real reverbs are made of: you just can’t have that many echoes, so people do their allpasses and other things to approximate the sound.

But what if you could have that many echoes?

A classic way to build up echo density is with a Householder matrix. It’s 4×4 so you need sixteen delays, but you get 256 echoes from just those sixteen delays, and better still, you can run them all either directly or inverted with no other gain changes. You get a matrix where if you feed the output back into the input, it gives you infinite sustain without any frequency running away. And feedback multiplies the echoes more, so it can get super dense for you.

But what about other matrixes? Turns out there’s math for Householder matrices of all sizes. If you use 25 delays, you can make a 5×5 matrix, where some of the mixing paths are times 3 and some are times negative 2. That gives you 3125 echoes before feedback, which is a lot more. On the other hand, some of your reverb paths are louder than the others, but only somewhat. Then there’s a 6×6 Householder matrix. There’s math for it, but now the diagonal path is twice as loud as the other paths, undermining the effectiveness… but now you have 46,656 distinct echoes. Before feedback. What could be better than that? (and this can be heard in VerbSixes, by the way)

Enter the Conference Matrix. It’s a 6×6 matrix, and unlike the previous ones, it leaves out one summing path for each section. It’s as if the diagonal path is zero: only five of the delay chains connect to the next stage. But it’s always a different section being left out, so all the information does find its way through… and the big difference is, now all the paths are unity gain again, just with some of them phase-flipped in the manner of a 4×4 Householder matrix.

When you combine one of those 6x6es with a Householder 4×4 to feed it, you’re looking at close to 12 MILLION echoes before feedback… and the regeneration can be infinite without it running away. But VerbSevens is primarily designed to be a test-bed: feed any combination of delays into it and it’ll show you what that does. It just happens to do double duty, as a sort of ginormous reverb pad. How does it sound when it’s doing 12 million echoes over an enormous space?

It sounds very nice. Because of the combination of the 4×4 and 6×6 I selected for it when you’re not compiling it to test things, it works like VerbSixes did, VerbSixes had a few little tweaks intended to produce realistic deep-reverb sounds, though, and they could interact with certain tones in a way that made a noise. VerbSevens no longer tries to do anything of the sort… so it’s a huge reverb, but also an unrealistic one, in that the highs don’t die away or alter. It’s just giant creamy space, turning any noise no matter how percussive into a total wash, and it now does that a lot better than VerbSixes ever could.

Hope you like the new genre ‘reverb and more reverb’, because this is your plugin for making 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 for x86
download Pi4VSTs.zip for 32-bit Pi
download Pi5VSTs.zip for 64-bit 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 October 18, 2026
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

DeRez5

TL;DW: DeRez5 adds new forms of derezzing.

DeRez5.zip (527k) standalone(AU, VST2)
DeRez5 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Lo-Fi’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

Interestingly, the last time I worked on DeRez I was also putting a lot of time into Meter. Maybe I turn to imaginary digital noises when struggling to unearth the secrets of the great analog noises.

DeRez5 builds on everything DeRez4 can do: in fact if you set Square to 0 and Trim to 1, you have DeRez4 again, complete with the frequency crush, linear point-to-point interpolation, and Bezier filters to turn any corners into neat little rounded places without altering the straight parts of the lines. That is of course weird and has nothing to do with musical or harmonic behavior, but we’re doing something different so it doesn’t matter :)

Add the Square control, and now we can go from the original point-to-point undersampling behavior, to full zero-order-hold behavior: meaning, squarewaves! The control progressively untilts the angles of the point to point waves until they’re fully square in all their cornery glory. You can still use the Bright control to add neat little round parts to where the corners are.

The Trim control sounds innocent, but it’s anything but. If you’re heavily derezzed, and you increase Trim, it’ll sound like you’re raising the DeRez control back up again… kinda. Except it’s grungier, weirder, less predictable, and it stops imposing a clashing note onto the sound, because the frequency’s less regular. What it is doing is allowing angle-reversals in the underlying sound to determine the derez frequency… so if you crank it, you can definitely get more highs in there and save deeper crunchiness for when bass is happening, but it goes beyond that. You can sneak Trim up just enough to interfere with the steadiness of the underlying derez frequency, producing an altered sound with a little more ‘mulch’ to it but without dragging in as many highs. You can crank it and see at what point DeRez starts to step on the real highs. You can shape all that with Bright and Bassis, and heighten the edge with Square. And you should tune all this to the sounds you’re working with, because more than any other DeRez, the whole sound of this plugin interacts with the sound that’s, in theory, being destroyed.

Hope you enjoy melding this weird thing with your tracks! :)

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 for x86
download Pi4VSTs.zip for 32-bit Pi
download Pi5VSTs.zip for 64-bit 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 October 11, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

kRockstar2

TL;DW: kRockstar2 is a realistic hall reverb using a new matrix!

kRockstar2.zip (678k) standalone(AU, VST2)
kRockstar2 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

kRockstar is no longer the most impressive realistic Airwindows reverb, because everything changed when I discovered the Conference 6×6 matrix.

What that means is, each delay line output no longer feeds the next six delays in line. Instead, each delay feeds only five out of six… but they’re always different ones, and more importantly, they’re all either unity gain or inverted unity gain. Just like the 4×4 Householder matrix!

Except, with a 4×4 matrix one input sound produces 256 echo returns, before feedback. With a 6×6 matrix, one input sound produces 46,656 echo returns before feedback… NOT counting the 3×3 matrix that handles predelay and placement in the room, So, 1,259,712 distinct echo returns, before feedback.

It sounds lush. The texture is even better than kRockstar (exactly the same reverb algo and delay times, just so you could compare the two techniques!). It’s also adding a Distance control, which is FastDistance but split in two, so that one half of it runs inside the undersampling and produces exactly the same tone no matter the sample rate. The other half runs outside the undersampling, specifically to darken exactly the part of the plugin that’s meant to be smoother if you’re filtering. If you’re into dark spaces like your classic Bricasti tones, this control is your friend.

kRockstar2 does not use the subtle tone adjustments I came up with for Ultralight, because I wanted it to match kRockstar closely. Both do have a subtle taste of nonlinearity to them, cleaning up just a tiny bit quicker than expected, blooming with loud sound just a little more to make the point.

As a final touch, kRockstar2 has the same ‘alive silence’ thing I first added to kCyberCity, and continued in kRockstar, where the air in it breathes with a background space caused by the hall volume being activated by gentle air movement. It’s too quiet to hear, but like properly applied dither, it alters the way you hear sounds drop beyond hearing. It’s just that dither stops things from dropping into grit.

With kRockstar2, when sounds drop away they drop into a sense of place, that’s felt more than heard. Kind of like things in the real world. And again, if you’re hearing the reverb washes, that’s all fine, but that also means you have it distractingly loud. See how it works when you balance the sense of how big things are, against the other elements in the mix, so that sense of hugeness is simply another presence alongside all the other things you’re hearing. The sense of place you get from handling it that way might be just what you needed.

The reverb developments are coming fast, so expect me to beat this pretty soon :)

Note: I’ve worked out the problem some users have been having with CPU usage: the same instruction I’ve used in various recent plugins (RetroBass, ChannelX, PurestWarm3, Ultralight, Ultralight2, and now kRockstar2) to increase tone quality and performance, HURTS performance lots on AMD Athlons. That’s the fused multiply add instruction, which doesn’t exist on those AMD chips, so they work around the lack. For now I can flag which plugins have it, so on the Airwindows website there’s now a tag for it. Its usefulness, especially when the compiler can incorporate it into SIMD processing, is too good to pass up but I’ll remain aware, and it’s possible I can make special builds for those machines if there’s a special reverb that’s just too incredible to not let everybody have. I don’t think kRockstar2 is quite there but I might get one with upcoming work :)

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 for x86
download Pi4VSTs.zip for 32-bit Pi
download Pi5VSTs.zip for 64-bit 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 October 4, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

ConsoleX3 Is Out!

OK, so for the ConsoleX3 shown in the video, go here:
https://github.com/airwindows/ConsoleX3/releases
and click on the version number at the top. As of posting it’s 0.0.7 (cue theme music!) and for this repository, I’ve not been able to get Github to set it as a ‘latest release’, but that’s the one.

If you would like the standalone, no-GUI versions such as for Raspberry Pi, I have those too!
ConsoleX3NoGUI.zip (882k) standalone(AU, VST2)
If you mean to use the GUI version, don’t install the Audio Unit from this, the installer for the GUI version doesn’t want to install if there’s already a plugin of that name present.
If you want to use a surround-capable version of ConsoleX3, you HAVE to use the Audio Unit ‘ConsoleX3Mono’ plugin, because that’s the one that will run any number of channels (it doesn’t do surround panning, though, you’ll have to do that separately).

If you want to use AirwindowsGlobals and have the nice grey watercolor texture I favor, or to customize the look of it any way you want, use this:
AirwindowsGlobals.zip (158k) (text file, folder structure and jpeg)
There’s an extra folder in there telling you to put the ‘Airwindows’ folder into your Documents folder. If JUCE looks for documents files in a different place on your system then put it there instead, but on the Mac it knows to look in the Documents folder, so it goes Documents/Airwindows/AirwindowsGlobals.txt and the GreyWatercolor.jpg goes beside that file. I encourage making the Airwindows GUI plugins your own in this way. AirwindowsGlobals now has a bunch of comments telling you how to do stuff, making it easier to use.

The standalone plugins are in all the existing standalone plugin collections, but ConsoleX3 has too many controls to go into Consolidated so it doesn’t go in Consolidated. For a GUI version, go to Github and use the one I made, for the Chris vision of how wild GUI plugins can go.

Hope you like ConsoleX3! I will be bringing out the new plugins (such as Rockstar2, BezEQ4, Weave) which are either in the demo, or built into ConsoleX3 but don’t exist as standalone yet. For instance, the overdrive control ‘More’ is the ‘Weave’ algorithm and this is the first you’re seeing it, or a Console algorithm that uses the ‘derivative BIP’ thing I came up with after not successfully reinventing Signalsmith’s ‘elliptic BLEP’ antialiasing :)

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

Date September 27, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 12 Comments

Chris

VerbSevens

DeRez5

kRockstar2

ConsoleX3 Is Out!

human-made bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club