An inspiring poetry reading and interview last evening in Manchester, to see (well, mostly hear, my view was obscured) Jackie Kay. She's written a lot about protest (and done a lot of it too!). My childhood taught me that protest is futile, that we must accept our lot as best as we can. She also said something about the importance of politics, where I think politics is utterly unimportant. All politicians consider themselves the most important beings in the universe, but the actions of the non-politician masses have more power, and the ideas of philosophers, artists, and theologians have more influence on our minds, ideas, and emotions. These small differences in view aside, almost everything her ever-delightful self said rang true. I left feeling inspired.
Today, more audio effects. The new Stone Compression trackers and gates are a generational leap up, so I felt I had to replace the other gate effects; principally my noise gate 'Watergate', so today I created 'Firegate'. Watergate sounds okay, but there are a few little problems with it. First, it's frequency dependent (the settings only work at 44100hz). Second, it uses the older-style multiplication based trackers which have can have strange artifacts at tiny levels; and those don't track the signal tightly so that the 'threshold' levels are somewhat arbitrary and organic. In sound, Watergate switched on the gate with an up curve (9 o'clock to 12 o'clock) and off with a fast down (9 o'clock to 6 o'clock). That sounds pretty.
The new Firegate (like the Stone Compressor) is now frequency independent, it works the same at 22050hz as 44100hz as 88200hz. The gate is an S-curve up and down, making it more symmetrical and neat. Watergates tail makes it sound a little warmer but the results are very close. Here's a gate signal (top) and the source (bottom):
One other improvement is channel-linking the trace. Almost all of the time I gate mono signals, but when not I've never wanted independent tracking per channel, so it's a waste of processing to do that.
I had the idea for these at 7am, and by now at 10:40 the coding is complete. I don't use compression or gates much, so perhaps I can replace the older uses (I say 'much' but there may be 20-80 songs or sequences with them, it might take me a solid week or more to replace them all by hand). My main use for gating is to lower the volume on one track when it's high on another. This is useful to quieten the background when the vocals sound, so that on a per-syllable basis the rest of the song is attenuated.
