Lately I've been experimenting with clippers and limiters in my mastering chain.
After trying Flatline I have to admit that the end result with a clipper seems much more clear.
Obviously im a beginner when it comes to these things but im curious if you guys use a limiter or a clipper.

 

It depends on what the clipper actually does.
Someone can create a clipper that does the exact same thing as the best limiter.
Or they can make it act more like a cheap guitar distortion pedal where any adjustment will create buzzing sound.

The names that vendors use for their products has become increasingly useless, with false claims, marketing to the ignorant and even creation of top-notch plugins by geniuses...who are yet ignorant of terminology.

 

I am working in hard techno which undoubtedly is an incredibly loud genre (commercial masters up to -4.5LUFS). Especially when wanting to push tracks that far, the differences between limiters and clippers get magnified and from my personal experience high-end clippers can give you up to one clean db more (when you got a good one and know what you are doing. ) but never more. That means a clipper never serves as a replacement, just as a compliment to the limiter. Of course, you can also make clippers work as limiters and vice versa but let's just say you know the how-to.

I should add that the effect of a clipper is always distortion and you need an extremely good low distortion environment to accurately test if this distortion is detrimental (especially in the context of the mix, not soloed!). I use LCD-X's for that and it works really well.

My clipper of choice is Newfangled saturate (or in the elevate limiter, the same one) at almost never more than a db of GR, mostly less.
That's just my experience and opinion.

 

Like @Swishish said, it's 2 different thing. Working with loud club genre, it's a great combinaison to have. The limiter will work better if you put a clipper before.

But depending on how much access you got to the mix, it's better to use clipper on separate stems. I use it on almost every tracks, sometime on group bus if needed, and then a last one on the master before all the limiting/maximazing process. Each clipper will work a little, not enough to be heard, but at the end, you can be really loud with the final master, and the limiter (if needed) can work much more better without being triggered by tiny transients (same with compressor, basically, I use compressor to add groove and clipper for peaks).

But as I said, I'm working on really loud genre, like dubstep/riddim or techno, so it's not a process that you should apply all the time.

So to answer your question, a clipper doesn't replace a limiter, it complement it

 

When mastering engineers use clipping, they only use hardware clipping. It's an expensive high-end converter.
No digital clipper can make the sound louder. It's just an unpleasant distortion.
Study the dynamics of sound using the eq comp limiter.
Can be better and louder

 

Just adding a clipper to your mastering chain will at most allow 1-2dB extra without negative consequences.
The trick IMO is using clippers in the mix stage on percussive/transient elements, and limiters on musical tonal elements.
If you have 10 layers of drums/percussion each can be cleanly clipped a few dB which is a big improvement in headroom for drum bus processing. Limiting individual tonal elements preserves the dynamic integrity as much as possible in a similar way. Controlling peaks needs to happen in small steps in multiple stages for a clean and loud end result, it's not something you can just do on the master bus.

These days my final limiter is doing 1-2dB reduction at most, but the result is much better and louder. I recently played a set where some mixdowns were accidentally overbaked to -4dB RMS and it still sounded acceptable because the transients were far more punchy due to multi-stage clipping and the limiter wasn't doing much.

 

Last edited: Sep 14, 2022

personally i use a clipper for the sound of it (crunch/aggression), and a limiter for the loudness and actual limiting purpose (true peak)

so i might go in hot with a clipper with +6db, but i might then turn it down to gain compensate for it, then keep adding other plugins if necesarry, and for the final LUFS and loudness settings ill use the limiter, but it doesnt usualy play a big role in terms of sound and shaping, just because the clipper shoves off any peaks mostly.

clipper can be used as a brickwall limiter, but in my opinion should be used for it's sound shaping characters, and not the final limiting aspect of it
but hey, aint no rules in this b*** do whatever u want

 

lol thats not true at all. Luca pretolesi for example uses the Standard Clipper all the time. It’s even on his Mastering Template. And so do a lot of other people. The standard clipper and the kazrog one sound great and do make songs sound louder.

 

Nice Clippers vs Compressors video. Yep, it's not about limiters, but quite an interesting one(almost 2 hours long):

 

I use the standard clipper on the mixbuss just for subtle saturation, and also use it on the master right before the final limiter to catch any transients. I used to reach 4db gr with my limiter before adding the second clipper, now it's around 1-2db.

 

On individual channels Stillwell's Event Horizon is an oldie that holds it's own with a fraction of the CPU. Dave Pensado said it reminds him and others of the sound of a Lavry Gold with this setting. That was basically the standard for converter clipping so it's not true you need expensive converters for that sound.

If you use Reaper there's a free JS version included and you can also add oversampling to plugins that don't have it. The VST version has a bug where it can report the wrong latency on recall, but clip mode has 0 latency so just turn PDC off for the plugin or toggle between limit and clip mode for the correct latency to be reported. I bought Acustica's new clipper but don't use it since I can use this on 50 tracks for every one instance of that.

StandardCLIP is awesome if you want more control and the developers aren't dumb so they include separate real-time and render oversampling options and bypass on silence so you don't have a plugin with 128x OS chewing your CPU with no input.

The "proper" way to use clippers in a mix is to link the threshold and ceiling since the point is to increase headroom, if the sound needs to be louder use the fader. Another tip is to use a transient shaper before the clipper which can compensate for the transients you lose by making the remaining ones more prominent.

 

Last edited: Sep 17, 2022

please delete internet

 

for cutting transients and atonal material clipping sounds always better than limiting in my opinion, if you dont overdo it you can get more loudness without any noticable change to the source material. you just want to keep from clipping your basslines and fundamentals, that gets nasty very quickly and limiting is more suited or even compressing and then cutting the remaining transients with a clipper can also work well.

the new delta feature in flatline works wonders to determine how much you can cut.

 

You have never used a clipper but you consider yourself eligible to comment on it and mislead somebody.
If you go above 0db, (not just +0.1 db, but also multiple dbs) the fl studio clipper keeps the sound the same with no audible difference while preventing the sound from going over 0db, just try the free demo and see for yourself. That's how they use it on kicks, I'm not sure about whole mixes.

 

I don't think you are necessarily in disagreement with him. How is the output of a clipper plugin "louder" than a brick wall limiter set at the same dB output? It's clipped/limited at whatever dB we set at the output side of the plugin. Where does the variance between the two approaches begin, the delay in the attack of the limiter?

 

luca is clipping with a dangerous converter, and the standard clipper he uses in the tutorial is probably the tool for the tutorial video.
Because viewers don't have the hardware. Don't think the tutorial video is his everything.
And I'm sorry if a lot of digital clipper devotees here are offended.
However, this is a technique used by real mastering studios, and until a few years ago it was a secret of only a few large studios like Sterling. After securing rms and dynamic range through converters, they work to create depth and width using comp eq and mid side.
I've never seen any other pro mastering studio use a digital clipper to master.

 

What are you getting from the internet? zz

 

Unlike digital clipping, hardware converter clipping is not a pulse or square waveform. I would say it is similar to tape compression.

 

Hey @BlackHawk, with which of the facts I listed do you disagree? Please enlighten us.