TL;DW: Fake bottom octave for fun and profit!

Floor

So this is one of those weird ‘considered harmful’ plugins… the ‘Don’t do this’ plugins. I don’t really advocate for this one as I don’t entirely approve: it’s kind of like some of the loudenators in that respect, and indeed it has similar characteristics.

But, I don’t hide information, so here ya go, complete with the open source ;)

Floor does an odd thing that’s like trying to synthesize fake harmonics related to the real bass content, to make you think there’s a lower octave there when there isn’t. It might not be the most perfect implementation of this (I understand there’s a Waves plugin that does this type of processing and I think I must have modeled it on that) but it’s the Airwindows take on reverse-engineering that type of processing, while knowing nothing but the desired effect and the general category of what’s happening.

This means it’s now part of the open source toolkit and can find its way into other stuff: here’s hoping real bass continues to be a thing (honestly, so much of what I do with Airwindows serves to improve linearity in the tiny micro-modulations that help us hear extended bass as a satisfying, resonant thing) even with an expanded toolkit around these frequencies. A lot of my recent work around DubSub and BassKit has been about introducing extended bass frequencies in a desirable way. I could’ve tacked the Floor algorithm onto there, and I decided that wasn’t good to do.

Why would you want to do fake bass?

Because you can get more loudness out of it. (also, maybe you’re just doing something interesting with tonalities, or exploiting the algorithm to make a different sound…) Mostly, it’s just about making it seem like you can go louder with the same content. It’s not really the same, it’s altered, but it’s simulating/faking the effect of an extended bottom octave and restricting the ‘swing’ of those frequencies so they cover the smaller range taken up by a higher frequency, because they’re really NOT the extended frequencies anymore, just some rearranged energy trying to pretend it’s deep bass. (I’m not sure how Floor will work as a DC blocker for RawConsole5 fans: seems like it might have undesirable effects? How do you even fake DC energy?)

For all I know this will blow up with conversation and enthusiasm: you never can tell. If you’d like to see me doing more work on things like fake bass, join the Patreon and tell me here: there are plenty of places like Facebook and Twitter where I’m not really into spending all my time conversing, but I follow plugin forums more closely. I’m not sure whether there’s a comparable thing like fake treble, but you know if I do any experiments of that nature I’ll let you have them, whether or not the results are sensible :)

I’m not sure whether Floor is sensible, but it’s yours: have fun if this is your idea of fun. I’m going to go back to making bass to feed my homemade (4) 12″ subwoofer in my studio, maybe I’ll go find a better power amplifier for it at some point (I’m driving it off a real low budget one, though I did customize it somewhat). Talk to ya later :)