TL;DW: Synthy resonant lowpass filter focussed on low frequencies.

Holt

Quite a week!

So, over the last week I got a shout-out in a New York Times op-ed… that (surely I can tell you folks if I can tell anybody) is based on my own research from years back about hit record sonic characteristics. Who knew that I’d end up seeing these ideas echoed on such a grand scale?

Who knew that it would happen while my web hosting provider knocked my website (all of them!) off the internet, for overwhelming ’em with a mighty over 400 hits a day? mezed don’t rely on toy hosting, kids, even if they say it’s ‘unlimited’. It’s like the plugin industry all over again. (I’m actively scouting out much realer hosting solutions and have a plan, more on that when I have more to report)

And after all that madness: here I am again, on Sunday, putting out a plugin same as usual. Well, not the plugin. That’s a little unusual.

Holt is a plugin suggested by one of my Q&A livestream regulars, that treads the waters of professional accountancy. The plugin, that is, not the regular. As far as I know.

How is this? Simple: Holt is a method you can use in Excel for predicting sales figures based on trends. It basically uses two variables each of which chase each other to try and cut through the noise of realworld data and produce useful predictive results. My friend from the livestream thought it might make a lowpass that was more fuzzy in tonality. It did not do that thing.

Instead, I got something like a low-frequency version of Aura: a resonant lowpass like a synth filter with huge control over the extreme lows. I had to do weird things to get it to track fairly consistently over different resonance settings, because the Holt method doesn’t really have anything like that at all: turning it into a synth filter is strictly my deal. So is the multipole arrangement: this thing morphs seamlessly from no poles (dry) to four poles (24 dB per octave) with intense resonance or no resonance at all, based on how you set it.

It’s got an instance of Spiral built in to save you when you make it squawk, because otherwise it’ll blow up your bassbins and just laugh at you. This sucker is MEAN from the midrange on down. The interesting thing is, if you crank the frequency up it tames itself and reverts immediately to dry again. It ONLY does its madness on the lows, and high frequencies are completely tame and nice. You can use it as a sophisticated and well-behaved lowpass on the upper mids and highs, and it’s totally polite. It’s just when you drop the cutoff frequency down that it explodes in juicy bass.

There are even several ways to go between that and clean, untouched audio. You can raise the cutoff, or you can use the dry/wet control, OR you can use the poles control (at any resonance setting) to morph it from bassy madness to perfect clarity… because the poles control is four different dry/wet controls bundled into one. This also means that if you’re using less than one pole of filter, you’re not even running through the other stages: less processing, unless you want it.

It can act like a DJ ‘isolator’, it can act like a synth bass lowpass, it can damn near self-resonate, and all from just a couple variables (per pole) that interact strangely. It’s a neat example of extreme simplicity (like the Purest series) producing a striking result. Have fun and I hope you like it.

My Patreon is more important than ever now, because it costs a bunch of money to give this much stuff away. I think the website will hold up for a little while longer (if not, I’ll put up MediaFire links and make sure you still have access whatever my web host does) but Airwindows has grown to be big enough, that I MUST seek real hosting. And I’m gonna do it, and it’ll be awesome, but this is what you get for being a patron: I can not only do all this but update over 150 plugins and put out the improved versions and let people grab the new plugins immediately and come right back the next week and do more (Pafnuty, Holt, etc). Supporting my Patreon and letting it grow directly means getting serious web hosting so you can count on the files being there for you: if the scale of things outgrows your basic ‘yay unlimited bandwidth on a shared host!’ operation, your support means I can kick it up more than a notch. And maybe I’ll be on beans and rice for a while but you know… I really like amazing internet servers and super bandwidth. And I can share that, if I have it. So I mean to offer it. (thanks to the people supporting my Patreon and making that possible).