All About Tempo with Airwindows

August 26, 2020

For those of you who may not be familiar, Airwindows is the passion project of one Mastering Engineer and programmer Chris Johnson. His plugins are delightfully quirky, ranging from unusual dithers, to some astonishingly good sounding console emulation and saturation plugins. He also occasionally comes out with some plain old interesting ideas, such as what he terms the 'Nodal Tempo Guide' below. 

Tempo, often defined in 'BPM' short for beats-per-minute is always a fascinating topic, and can have a huge effect on the song. After playing with some of the tempos Chris suggests based on his 'genre' recommendations one thing that stuck out was that a lot of songs tend to be 1-2 BPM faster than you might expect. They do seem to be remarkably stable tempos however, I certainly noticed that they grooved harder than some more common tempos, so perhaps an interesting experiment to try out on your next session! 

Check out this and some of his other, very interesting plugins on Chris' website.