TL;DW: Mojo is a biggenator that also works as a loudenator.

Mojo.zip(342k)

Happy accidents! What I was trying to do was add a blend control to Spiral, so I could make a Channel that let you go between the original, ‘fatter’ sound and the cleaner, more transparent but less fat Spiral sound.

Instead, I got this (and another, complementary plugin to be revealed later). I coded up a refinement to the algorithm, where the ‘curve factor’ of Spiral got modified by powers of itself, or powers of powers of itself… up to the fourth power, which turned out to sort of have MAGICAL powers, or at least that’s how it seemed when I worked out what was happening to my test sine waves.

Mojo’s the result. It’s a neat little algorithm that doesn’t sound anything like Density, or Spiral. Instead, it sounds like concentrated HUGE. Even at no added boost, it makes the sound a lot fatter (much like what was asked: a more refined algorithm that still gets the fatness of Density). But then there’s more… when you start slamming it.

Turns out this simple little algorithm, one single transfer function without extra parts or switches or added tricks, soaks up input gain like nothing I’ve seen.

Understand, it’s not ‘clean’. It thickens and fattens the sound without any real EQ change, by where it puts the energy and how it rounds off peaks. It’s got a weirdly effective way of being able to round stuff off and then turn it into a mostly flat-topped output, like full-on digital clipping style loudness, but with neatly sculpted little curves going in and out of the flat stuff. It’s also such a nonintuitive algorithm that I wasn’t able to find an ideal spot to just straight clip it… so, like original Spiral, if you push beyond its limits it’ll start wavefolding on you (which can be an indication of too much slam). But the sweet spot is unusually wide and forgiving, and it sounds really loud while you explore that maximum limit.

Mojo is an accident, but it’s also an obvious ‘popular’ plugin. Check to see if you’re okay with the extreme fattening effect it has, since it does really have a sound and isn’t what you’d call clean, even in the absence of extra boost. But if you were already looking for some ‘mojo’ to be added, this Mojo might be just the type… and, like the original Density algorithm, this one is likely to show up in other plugins as an added saturation element, because it’s got a distinct flavor that will help certain plugins do their thing.

If you’d buy Mojo for $50 (perpetual license, lifetime support, plus install it on as many computers as you want and get the source code) you can go and pledge $50 a year at my Patreon. Or, use it anyway. Subscriptions are a big topic of discussion these days, so by acting like you need to stay on MY subscription it helps show that open source is the way of the future, and better than renting DRMed software that can be taken away from you. Airwindows is more future proof than many things because of this choice. Is it worth doing in this way, or do you have to take stuff away from people to force them to pay? We shall see, but I can’t help but notice I’m still here and haven’t run out of ideas.

Now, I AM running out of ways to make sense of the massive huge open source freely available yours-to-own library. So come hang out on my Monday Q&A livestream and we can talk about possible ways I can assemble ‘Airwindows kits’ to give people only a small set of the plugins at a time so it’s more approachable. You can always go and add anything else out of the library, but it’s time to get this juggernaut more approachable for newcomers :)