Airwindows’ latest plugin is Melt, a free ‘wobbly & weird’ effect plugin for Windows and Mac.
As useful as utility plugins are, sometimes you just have to do something wobbly and weird. Here’s Melt!
To explain what it’s doing will be a little tricky. You can just download it and play with it, but if you want to know what’s under the hood, here goes.
Suppose you have a delay buffer. You can read ‘echoes’ out of the delay buffer. If you like, you can move them around, which changes their pitch.
What if you started reading at one point, and stopped at another? You’d get a delayed ‘moving average’, a series of samples combined. It would be duller, rolled-off.
If you took that section and moved IT, then you’d have a rolled-off, darker delay tap that changed pitch.
Now, what if you took all the start points and all the end points, and made them all wobble and sway around independently, so that the shifting delay taps also changed in tone color and volume even while they pitch-shifted around?
Well, that’s Melt. It’s pretty freaky, when cranked way up. You can run a long extended delay, causing it to resemble a strange retro ambience effect, or you can tighten it right up so that you have more of a chorusy thing. It probably should always have a bunch of pitch shift depth, otherwise it’s a mite boring. You can include dry, or just crank up the wobbly weirdness: should be nice on pads and things, or anything that has to be more dark and diffuse and unpredictable.
Chris releases plugins faster than I can keep up with, so check list below for some more free utilities that were recently released as free VST plugins.
- BuildATPDF – Design your own tone-shaped TPDF.
- DoublePaul – Custom TPDF highpassed dither.
- Capacitor – Filter with an analog-synth-like effect to it.
- Sidepass – Highpass on the side channel.
- Not Just Another Dither/CD – 24 and 16-bit dither.
- Tremolo – Fluctuating saturation curves for a tubey tremolo.
- TubeDesk – A tube recording console type tone coloring.
- TransDesk – More of a transistory, rock desk tone coloring.
- Desk – Classic Airwindows subtle analog modeling.
The plugins are available as a free download for Windows and Mac (VST/AU). You can support the work at Patreon.
More information: Airwindows
