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So i'm bouncing and emailing tracks to clients-- thus have a bunch of 2-minute blocks of time, perfect for scanning the interwebz--and it seems like 1/2 of what i see on DSF is about clipping the master, avoiding clipping, how come my drums don't have enough punch/power unless everything's clipping, etc...

here's the thing. clipping your master, 90% of the time, sounds bad-- your bass loses focus, the high end gets crushy, the whole tune feels like it's wrapped in hazy aluminum foil, etc.

but inside your mix, clipping is a seriously important tool. the grainy digital distortion from clipping an audio file can really bring a snare sound, or lead, etc into focus.

One of the important things you learn in mixing audio is how to find the sweetspot of gear-- where something is perfectly balanced between clean operation and totally overblown sound. It's one of reasons we pay an arm and a leg for well-made gear, with transitors, tubes, circuits that can be overloaded and bring some magic to a sound, rather than just fart out. There's a great quote from Tubby, that you can't mix dub unless the board is in the red. you need to find that magic.

So yeah, if things don't have the right vibe-- clip 'em to hell at the channel and bus level. use an overdrive, bitcrush, or plain old clipper plug in. go nuts and dial it back.

(just don't clip your master)

Love this.

Yeah that's the old don't be afraid to break boundaries thang. Good post as usual!

i may just be zoned off today but is there ways of keeping your master from clipping apart from using a limiter or compressor if your using this in practise?

JTMMusicuk wrote:i may just be zoned off today but is there ways of keeping your master from clipping apart from using a limiter or compressor if your using this in practise?

if you mean 'how do I clip a channel without clipping the master too?', you can get clipping plugins. GClip is free, there are other free ones, you can basically set a threshold with these like a compressor and just clip the channel at any volume. You can just turn down the master too, but a lot of people dont like touching their master fader, you could drop the gain on the master channel with an effect too of course, but Id just get a clipping plug in and mix the channels at their usual volumes.

so compression or limiting then

Try routing the indiv channel to another channel. Boost original channel to clip, use the second channel fader to mix the clipped sound

policy wrote:Try routing the indiv channel to another channel. Boost original channel to clip, use the second channel fader to mix the clipped sound

ahh thats what i was looking for, thanks

JTMMusicuk wrote:so compression or limiting then

no no, clipping. Say you have drums peaking at -4 in their channel, and then -4 on the master, but you want to clip 2db off them, you would put a clipping vst on the drum channel, set the threshold to -6db and it would just clip off the top 2db from that sound, leaving -6db output from that channel going into the master. So you have clipped the drum channel without pushing its volume up at all, youre not clipping it by sending it into the red on its own channel, youre clipping it using an effect that will then just let you balance the sound with its own fader the way you normally would.

http://www.gvst.co.uk/downloads.htm




this is gclip, you can either use its gain control to boost into the clip line or you can use the clip control to reduce the threshold of the clip line, you can see a real time image of the sound runnign through that display on the right which shows you where the clip line is, the original sound is dark blue and the output is the light blue, so you can see how much you are clipping off. The softness control I think starts to act like a limiter, its like a soft knee on a limiter in a way, itll start to reduce the volume of the peaks as they approach the clip threshold if you dont want such a hard cut on the peaks.

There may be better clipping vsts out there, I dont clip much but if I do I just use this. anyone knows better ones please post them up.

ah ok, fair enough..i thought you were just on about an overdrive vst with an in-built limiter... moving on...