Hi friends,

I would like to know if you used a clipper in your plugin mastering chain, or not ?
Why ?
Which one ?
And the most important, where do you place it ?

Thank you in advance for sharing your knowledge

(Thanks to you, your comments, your recommendations, your contradictions in your discussions, I ask myself good questions, I try new plugins, I test them, I compare... and finally I perfect my mixing techniques.
Sorry for my very bad english)

 

I used to put a clipper as the last effect in the mastering chain to increase loudness, but i stopped using it since i don't really care much about loudness in my track. I used the T-Racks Classic Clipper or the FabFilter ProL-2 with Lookahead at 0, Attack at max and Release at 0.

Keep in mind that a clipper ALWAYS creates some artifacts, because it basically cuts the wave, and only when you have loud parts with a lot of highs you won't hear them.
I suggest you to play your tracks on everyday devices such as some earphones or a cheap speaker to check if you can hear artifacts on those, which are usually the most problematic ones.

 

Since im making beats and i really like my kicks to be hella fucking loud (6-12db of clipping lol), T-Racks 5 Classic Clipper is usually the first thing on my master chain, in fact, its a part of the sound i like (from producers like Wondagurl and Eestbound), i literally sometimes cant make the beat sound right without it.
There is something about its oversampling qualities that just make it sounds great and clean, altho if i want more distorted sound i might use a normal, cheaper soft clipper, but theres always a soft clipper on my master.

Sometimes (for loud kicks), i find that using a good buss compressor before the clipper can help getting a cleaner kick sound, i use the bx_townhouse with ratio of 2, slowest attack and fast release to get about -4db of GR, then bumping the post gain +1.5 (the default value) and then throwing the t racks clipper in there...

ahh just perfect

 

In front of the spliff.



Which one of you slags took my Clipper?

 

I tend to use Fabfilter Saturn on my master. It is a Saturation/Distortion plugin. At the very low levels it can provide some nice harmonic saturation to the master at the cost of clipping, but gives me more headroom to pull up the track.

This is a great technique because even though I am technically losing quality in my audio, the saturator is adding a nice warmth to my track, so it actually ends up sounding like the quality has improved and the master is tighter.

A clipper is good if you have the right techniques and tools...

EDIT: Well, I used to actually do that couple years back but now I kind of haven't been mastering or making music lately and have just refreshed my toolset. So when I get back into it I might use something else. But it worked when I was using it...

 

Last edited: Apr 13, 2019

Limiters and clippers get used for the same purpose, but they're different-sounding. So you might end up wanting both.

Limiters are more advanced, when a big peak is coming on they will try to turn down the entire peak seamlessly, so that the peak is preserved with as little distortion as possible. This action has a pumpy modern sound to it. The more the limiter wiggles and tries its crazy algorithmic tricks to preserve the peak, the more it inevitiably adds a sound quality around that peak that wasn't there in the original recording.

Clippers,being simple, would take that same incoming big peak and completely ignore it. No pumping or algorithmic artifacts around the peak at all. Then, when it exceeds the maximum, CRUNNCH. The top of the peak gets raped, for a split second and will sound horrible. What kind of of horrible depends on the type of clipping you're using and oversampling etc. But overall, it's always horrible. The saving grace is that the horrible only happens for a millisecond if the peak was short. And sometimes, that crunchy horribleness adds something desirable to percusssion or another "spikey" type of sound. And it certainly adds tons of loudness.

The entire dynamics of the performance when using clipping remains completely untouched, and there is value in that for both mixing and mastering. By using a clipper, you're choosing to not preserve the peaks, to let them get crunched. Instead of that modern limiter sound, with some work you can get something more reminescent of vinyl records using a clipper. Another strategy is a combination of both clipping and limiting to find a balance you like.

 

Last edited: Apr 18, 2019

I am getting used to not putting any clipper or even a compressor on my track or master chains. I don't know why, but I don't like compressed songs anymore (unless done with a slow attack to preserve dynamics or the distortion it adds sounds very good).
I use Tbaudio pro AB_LM extensively these days, to compensate for the gain the plugins add, and not anymore some of them sound good to me.

 

I just reviewed the chain on the master outs of a track I've been finessing (ie. screwing around with until I f*ck it up) and found that the whole thing sounded better as I removed everything but my UAD SSL G Bus compressor.

 

Got to be war-weariness. You ears are probably tired from the loudness war. I've been finally feeling a real change in the air lately, it's possible the loudness war is finally coming to a close, people are tired of it across the board and replay gain on social media platforms is punishing naive loudness maximization.

Can't wait for the loudness war to be over and forgotten as the ridiculous fad that it was.

 

Huh?? speak up. i can't hear you