Airwindows has released Thunder, a buss compressor effect plugin for Windows and Mac. With Thunder sub-lows get bigger the harder you drive it.

Instead of passing through the bass, it transforms it in a way similar to FathomFive, and uses that live, active signal to modulate what the compressor sees, where in turn the compressor’s output is modulated by the intense lows.

It’s a little complicated, so you can watch the video or simply download it and try it.

Also released is ClipOnly, a 2-buss safety clipper plugin. It operates at -0.2dB and offers powerful anti-glare processing.

Here’s what I’ve done. I started with Clip2 and the original Clip freebie, and I used the new plugin as a way to experiment with ideas about the recurrence of mathematical constants. For instance, a common value used in reverb allpass filters is 0.618… which can be continued into a mathematical constant, the Golden Ratio (0.618033988749894848204586). It’s common for these things to turn up in disparate situations, so I look for them.

And in the code where OneCornerClip rapidly converges onto full clipping with the broadest resulting variation of clip onset tonality, I found it zeroing in on cos(x) == x (0.739085133215160641655312) and selecting that optimal value for the guts of the thing I ended up with ClipOnly.

Another compressor that Chris released a few weeks ago is Pressure4.

Version 4 brings new functionality that has never existed in Pressure before: the stereo version (default for VST, and the Audio Unit that doesn’t specifically say ‘Mono’) uses a special linked mode based on diade bridges in hardware compressors. That’s not to say that it is ‘analog modeling’ because it isn’t.

From the beginning, Pressure has been made out of a lucky algorithm with a particular organic, pleasing quality, and part of Pressure4 is knowing what to strip down, how to simplify that algorithm until it lets all the music through.

The plugins are available for download for Windows and Mac (VST/AU) at no charge. You can support Chris’ work at Patreon.

More information: Airwindows