Recorded the God Infinity vocals today, how different and how easy this is for me now compared to the first recording. I also worked on adding the vocals to the epic 'You Will Seek It Love' parts. These tracks tend to peak quite dramatically; this album has some really quiet parts and really loud parts in sharp peaks. This inspired me to design a new limiter, which I call the Limnetic Limiter, named after the topmost transparent layer of water on a lake because this effect affects only the top layer of the sound.
Most limiters try to manage their task in real time; not easy when the incoming signal could be anything, and so they involve a volume tracker, sometimes a look-ahead delay and a sort of darting, bobbing, and weaving. For me, I know or can calculate my peaks, so can use this knowledge to apply the effect at the end. Say my signal peaks at 1.1, when it should be limited 1.0. My principle is to scale everything from a certain top level, say 0.9, to the 1.1 and simply scale any data there to fit in the 0.9 to 1.0 range.
This image of a saw wave indicates the limiter in action:
You'll note that the saw wave is bent and doesn't reach the top. Here, from 0.5 (the grey line in the graph), the signal is re-scaled to limit to 0.75 rather than keep going to its natural 1.00. I have an optional curve parameter to smooth things out, which can further help limit (or utilise) any distortion artifacts. In practice it sounds very good. I'll probably never use it on extreme parameters like this, only for trimming the top-most peaks.
It changes the timbre of some sounds, like these analogue waves, rather substantially and adds some pleasing fuzz too, so it will work as a sound effect too, and without any pesky volume trackers, attack, decay and all of that nonsense.
Most of the album is now reworked, but I realised today that I'd forgotten a song called The Tree. The digital guitars in that sound rather interesting, the song almost evokes the sound of a Fairlight CMI.
I'll need to record those vocals too, and incorporate today God Infinity vocals. This album remains my best work to date. I hope I can make many more.
