Having worked extensively with Tori Amos as both studio and monitor engineer, Marcel van Limbeek most recently set to work on a studio recording of the music for her stage production of The Light Princess. Featuring the original London cast, he made good use of Nugen Audio’s ISL 2 plug-in to provide real-time, broadcast-quality true peak limiting on the project.

‘I can’t recommend ISL 2 highly enough, not only as a vocal limiter but for any music recording project,’ he says. ‘I especially appreciate its transparency for controlling dynamic range in a very unobtrusive way. Other limiters can distort the sound, but ISL 2 enables us to remove peaky frequencies or sounds that are popping out a bit too much, without changing the original timbre and artistic intent of the music.’

Van Limbeek has more than 25 years’ experience in studio and live recording. Since 1994 he has collaborated with Amos and Mark Hawley, her husband and house engineer, recording, mixing and mastering 15 of her albums and DVD releases, four of which were Grammy-nominated.

For The Light Princess, van Limbeek and Hawley recorded all vocals using Pro Tools, and then processed the audio through a chain that began with a Neve 1084 mic equaliser for high-pass filtering, then to a Universal Audio compressor and a Manley Massive Passive EQ. The result was recorded back into Pro Tools and put through a final pass with ISL 2, which removed any transient audio peaks. For particularly dynamic vocals, van Limbeek applied ISL 2 prior to the analogue chain to provide upfront limiting and ensure that the analogue compressor would not apply excessive gain reduction.

‘We were working with incredibly talented singers that are trained to perform without amplification in a theatre,’ van Limbeek says. ‘With a mix of voices ranging from very soft to much louder, this can create dynamics challenges in a studio setting. ISL 2 was the perfect tool for reducing the peaks in the performances, and it was ideal for our hybrid digital/analogue workflow. We were able to create a rich, warm sound with the analogue equipment, and then use ISL 2 to remove unwanted frequencies in a very surgical, precise way.’

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