A lot of the recorded samples I am working with have a few hard hits clipping a little over 0 db... I am trying to compress them and it's helping but the problem is that my RMS is good but the peaks are still pretty high. I know I could just turn down the inter sample fader but I am trying to get rid of the peaks specifically because they sound like crapola! I swear we need to make a newbie 101 corner in the forums for my questions.

 

Not possible in the digital domain.
What kind of samples are you talking about? One-shots?
Did you record them yourself or are those premade samples? If they are from a commercial library I'd go out on a limb here and say they do not clip, it's you gain staging - or the lack thereof.

 

Any chance of posting the sample you are working with? I wouldn't mind having a go at it.

 

limiter? transient shaper? More compression? Manually with the cut tool in a wav editor? Or just straight up eqing out the problematic freqs? So many ways to do it.

 

Last edited: Oct 15, 2016

Can we give this guy his old screen name back yet? Or did he piss too many people off? Hes really trying these days. We're collabing on an ableton project and I (one of the people he pissed off the most) will vouch for Steve.

 

Not sure if I completely understand your problem... But why not bus your sample to another track and rerecord it to a useable level. Below 0dbfs... Then shape the sample with either automation or dynamic processors... If a sample is clipped, it's clipped. You can't take back something that's already been said.

 

@SteveDuda'sBoyfriend I love you bro. I'm just waiting for the day you ask us for help cracking SERUM.

 

Which old screen name? He's got hundreds

 

@subGENRE I know he's busy working on his "Greatest Hits Vol. 2" but could you ask him to post

Vol. 1 for us to enjoy...? nay ..scratch that.. just please score a discount for us poor beggars, so that we
may partake of the grandeur.. that was/is Steve ! ( or whatever personality moniker his genius thrives under )

I concede that an artiste of this stature should..MUST be paid

 

So taking a look at this sample, what would be the professional/industry standard way of taking care of these peaks? (fixing the harsh peaks)

 

Compression, limiting, or just turn down the fader.

 

Okay so just a multiband for the upper harmonics, limiter is a good idea too.. Thanks for the info, I liked the non conventional answers also.

 

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

 

Don't you just love it. You take your time, anwer the guy seriously just to be ignored.
[irony]Yes, a compressor is the way to fix levels. It does not alter the sound, it's best used to work on the levels[/irony]
Yes sure, multiband compression is the tool of choice. Like everybody in this thread suggested.

 

Have you recorded and clipped your audio? Then record again so that you have unclipped audio.
If you want to attenuate transients you can try a transient designer.

Oh, hi Steve Faoki!

 

What are you talking about? I enjoyed all the answers given to me..

 

After listening to the clip I would have went with a transient shaper, but I also like to tweak sound. You can bring out more of the other body tones in the clip or the snap of the hits depending on how you set the attack. Most if not all transient shapers have some sort of limiter buit in. So if you open up the attack all the way and just raise the gain, your just using it like a limiter. Put a scope of some sort after it so you can see what its doing to the wavform. The volume shaper plug has a nice waveform display. Just until you get comfortable with the plug.

Or if you dont want to mess with the transients of the clip just use a limiter and shave a hair to a couple dB off till your happy

There are a lot of different transient shapers/designers out there from multi band ones with pretty graphics and features galore like sidechaining, etc. I use a simple old one from schack audio, only because I can get what I want out of it easily. Turn 3 knobs a click a button done in 30 seconds. And less CPU overhead than a fancy GUI Multiband type

 

Last edited: Oct 16, 2016

Compression will not help you get rid of the peaks without completely squashing the punch of the drums. If you use a super quick compressor that's exactly what it will do and still some of the transients might get through.

So if I were you I would have 2 options here.

1) Use a limiter with an attack release control. Set the release control to something quick (between 30-60ms) and the attack just enough that you don't completely kill the punch. If you find that the peaks are still too strong then you'll need to close the attack on the limiter and come to a compromise.

2) Use soft clipping/distortion. Distortion and soft clipping help square off peaks and transients. Use it just enough to shave off the highest peaks without audible distortion.

 

Flux Pavillion used to do this with every track he sent to the engineer...

 

Hi, my guess is you are not dealing with peaks but spikes (short hf burst at the transient section).

As already linked and recommended, I`d go for gclip as a startup.
Not only as a tool but also as a reader (with zoom) to see what is really happening.

Like the very low sub section, spikes do eat a lot of headroom
without contributing anything useful to a mix and a compressor isn`t the right tool in the first place.

The yin/yang aspect of the spike treatment is of
when you bring them down, the lower freq are coming up
and you have a more balanced sound event you may want to compress afterwards.

To back it up with a very good visual representation, I would also recommend s(M)exoscope.
It is sitting permanently jbridged on my master bus without causing any conflict.

S(M)exoscope is also a very helpful tool to check and practice compression
by watching the changes of transient and body when playing with parameters.

Good luck and practice.