This changed how I use clippers in mastering forever
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ก.พ. 2024
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Hello, I'm Nicholas Di Lorenzo, Studio Owner, Mixing and Mastering engineer at Panorama Studios.
I'm an Italian-Australian born and raised in Melbourne. I've been a creative professional for 10 years managing some pretty awesome projects for artists, labels and producers all around the globe.
What motivates and drives me?
My family,
Good food,
Great coffee.
You can find me on many platforms:
Instagram: / panorama_mastering
Facebook: / panoramamastering
Twitter: / panoramamasters
Kit: kit.co/Panorama_Mastering
Nobody reads the manual! We just wait for people like you to enlighten us. LOL.
Dont mention it lmaoo
We don't need a manual, we have Nick
🤣🤣🤣
theres plenty people who do, including me when its a device with more hidden functions...heck i even read most of the Bitwig manual lol
Standard Clip is one of those plug ins that just get better and better the longer you own it.
Amen!
Totally agree. It’s still the best clipper imho, and once you learn your way around it a bit the workflow it offers is unmatched
Best channel for real Mixing and Mastering, never any BS, never talks without knowing what he's going to say and you don't seem to make videos just to have an upload like some of the other channels on here.
Thanks man! Appreciate the love
OK. So, you are taking the amplitude delta between the loudest peak (-5.6) and the average loudest level of the rest of the music (-9.6) which is 4 dB and telling the clipper that the max ceiling for just the amplitude between -9.6 and -5.6 should be -7.6. Is that right? And the closer the amplitude gets to the actual peak of -5.6, the more clipping gets applied to that amplitude - so a transient of -5.6 will be soft-clipped to -7.6 but a transient of -6.6 will clipped even more softly/gradually. Is that right?!!
I tend to favor hard clipping on grittier sounding music because as I understand it, hard clipping tends to sound more transparent up until it indroduces a really ugly sounding distortion. Soft clipping sounds smoother and more forgiving to me, but introduces distortion at the threshold. This sounds gorgeous on mixes that have higher peaking transients, but can get to overkill quick when the softer knee starts eating into the rms. Also all saturator plugins are soft clippers of some kind. Tube saturation tends to have asymmetric transfer curves, where as symmetric function only introduce third order harmonics. That’s why pushing anything hard into a hard clipper makes it sound essentially like a square wave
So for clarity of your comment, for more dynamic music you'd use a soft clipper to preserve the larger, more dynamic peaks, but for loud, aggressive music (say harder EDM, Metal, Rap...) you'd use a hard clipper?
My question as someone that has done mastering only on an amateur and personal level, is it unadvisable to combine the two? Say a very small amount of hard clipping followed by a soft clipper or vice versa? I know it's not conventional, but I'm interested to hear what people's experience is with that and if there's any use to that, or if the technique is just plain dumb for a reason I don't know.
@@cgollimusictry it and if it sounds good, why not?
@@choppa24k for sure! Just asking if anyone with more experience has made any conclusions themselves
Symmetric waveshaping can add any odd-numbered harmonic; not just 3rd order. Usually, they add the entire (odd) overtone series (3, 5, 7, 9, etc. up to Nyquist), at progressively decreasing energy levels (3 is louder than 5 is louder than 7, etc.).
Asymmetric can add both odd- and even- numbered harmonics.
@@cgollimusicI like that idea and may try it myself, thanks. Will report if anything notable happens.
I'm not one to leave comments but this popped up just as I finished a master, decided to change the soft clip settings using this method. Honestly mind blowing how it adds depth instantly. thanks man
Glad I could help!
@@panorama_masteringhey man, can you please compare Standard Clip and Orange Clip
I was just watching an AU5 vid about this experimental FFT based "multiband" compressor called Spectral Compressor, and when he showed one use case he found for it, I immediately thought of you! This thing is wild, you can use it as a clipper, but as it can compress with an infinite ratio with 0 attack and 0 release time, and subsequently distort each FFT band separately (if set to as low an FFT window size as your PC can handle, and to have as little overlap of the FFT windows as possible) this means digital clipping with essentially zero intermodulation distortion!! It's essentially a multiband compressor with close to infinite bands...
Other VSTs employ this tech behind the scenes too (like the Sonible smart comp and I think sooth), but this thing has so so many other controls and interesting use cases, where as smart comp etc. are designed to take away control and automate the processing for you, this thing is the polar opposite and wants you to get fully hands on with every variable. It can do exactly what sooth can just with more controls (al be it with more time spent getting to the result, making these other smart processors still have their place tbh). You can use it to take the S/C signal from another sound source, imprint it so it removes them frequencies from the main sound, invert the phase polarity and overlay it on the original signal, creating a delta signal, and then have only the frequencies that are in both sounds play and have one sound with the tonal characters of another and a bunch of other really really crazy stuff, it's really wild.
It's free as well! A bit fiddly to install as it's a github project, but well worth it if you really want to get granular with your processing. They have a bunch of other cool looking free plugs too, I've not had time to check the others out yet though, as as soon as he said intermodulation distortion free clipping, I had to come over here haha!.
What you seem to pay zero attention to is the fact that, when you compare the "soft pro" clipping transfer curve (in Plugin Doctor or whatever it is) to the hard clipping transfer curve, the "soft pro" line up to the threshold is off to the left of the hard clipping transfer curve.
This means that even below the threshold, there is already a volume boost i.e. the volume of the signal going out is louder than it was going into the processor. So it doesn't just clip, it also boosts "into" the clipping part, which is a no-no because it alters the signal in ways it shouldn't.
In typical soft clippers e.g. using the hyperbolic tangent, the transfer curve will always be "inside" the linear hard clipping transfer curve, even if the input is boosted "into" the clipping. The ideal would be to stay fully linear i.e. "on" the hard clipping transfer curve until the "clipping range" begins, in which the peaks are squashed.
Great video as always!
Just love people who make me think about doing things I've done the same for ages suddenly want to do it differently.
Me too!
Every mix that I send you has the Pro settings on my 'All Drum Bus'. Glad to see you sharing more helpful tips! Thank you!
You rock!
Thank you so much for sharing this, the results speaks for itself. Cheers man!!!
Awesome thanks so much for this vid // been using standard clip since a year 😅 was simply hard clipping before the limiter - your analysis is pure gold
WOW Nicholas ! that is freaking amazing! clear trensients and very OPEN sounding , thank you !!!!
you got a sense of dynamics and also gained that crunch on the top of the trensients that pokes outta the speaker.
reminded me a bit of luca's method of using Pro-G as an expender, before clipping to get a sense of dynamics - in a different and inovative way of course. thank you again
Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for watching
Cheers Nic these videos are really helping my mixs
This is awesome. Thank you for sharing with us!! 🙏🏻🙌🏻
My pleasure!!
Finally, someone made sense of that dial.
I can hear clear differences, particularly when trying to get an already loud source up to competitive levels.
I read the manual but it really didn't click, until ... Thanks a lot!
Glad I could help!
love ur vibes and the knowledge u shared with us. and it's much better to listen to a human being capable to talk the talk while walking the walk without the fast edits and adhd bs. subbed!
Amazing content. Dude you’re an inspiration! Thanks for that ending.
I appreciate that! Thanks for watching
Excellent, thanks!
A HUGE thank YOU!!!
My pleasure!
i appreciate your visual cues for how to set up ceiling and softclipping amount. I agree it can help to see the amount of reduced peak levels in the waveform. i always use v-clip for that. has a builtin oscilloscope. but for the softclipping amount I prefer to go by ear. cause the softer the transfercurve is the more distant it sounds, which is why I often prefer a rather hard clipping, but ofc that makes the transitions between dry and distorted more noticable, which is also not cool
Thank you
I´m gonna try this method on my next mastering session. Thank you for sharing your discoveries :-)
My pleasure, let me know how you go
thanks for walking through this. I had the same question about the percentage slider as well! Lol. much appreciated.
Glad it was helpful!
Brilliant, thanks!
You're welcome!
Thanks a lot for another great tip! Exactly at the right time 🙏👍👍👍
My pleasure!
Great video! Thanks man :)
Wo that sound so goooood, crazy
Well i'll be damned. I did not know that. Fun to discover this with you. Can tell you're excited haha. I'm gonna try this on EP i'm working on right now. Cheers
Let me know how you go!
Wow, what a difference!
Thanks for sharing ⚡️🤝🏻
No problem 👍
Really helpful advice! I too found that clipping later in the chain affects transient shape a bunch (that we work so hard to control). Clipping upfront's better. because it really reduces how much work the limiters and compressors downline have to do. The technique in this video lets me "have my cake" by compressing the top few Dbs and leaving the body untouched.
Good share!
great info!
Glad it was helpful!
A really great share, thank you. So nice to get some clarity on what that goddam percentage slider actually does in the pro mode 🙂Looking forward to trying it out on groups in a mix too. Your channel and insights are fantastic.
Glad it was helpful!
nice shave bro, looking fresh !!
Looking like Tommy from Snatch
Good stuff.
Thanks!
Excellent that you point this out. Now try staging the soft clipping with varying transfer curves the same way on especially on the heavy transient elements earlier in the mix to simulate pushing into transformers. Even try putting one clipper berfore your 2-bus processing and then again before your limiter to emulate D2A, outboard soft xlipping and then A2D. Better low end and overall body. Prove me wrong 😜
I like sine folding my kick and sidechained bass together, kinda does the same thing, but i think sinefolding sounds cool and kinda transparent. If you don't have fast enough transients on your kick og drums in general, transientshaping, or compression adjusting the attack according to how fast or slow transient you want before clipping/waveshaping. I like to exaggerate the transients so the transient of my kick(for example) gets more distorted than the tail of the kick which is especially helpful if you're like me and like muffled 808-like kicks without much high frequencies in the transients.
to easily A/B (hard vs soft) using the soft clip pro algo is to: .. leave the clip ceiling at the same value and for the soft clip, use the Input level to bring back the level (25% is -3, 50% is -6, 75% is -9 dB etc ) IMO what makes this clipper better in most cases than others is the detailed options we have the OS menu!
I started my mixbus-chain with the Standard Clip w/ soft clip at 50% just as an overal setting for a vibe I liked, but I'm going to try Soft Clip Pro and your more measured approach for sure!
it's basically a tanh(x) function, the most basic saturator you can build
Don't come at me with math, explain it without math 😂
exactly!
So? It's exactly what 99% of all clippers use. The important thing is how it's implemented with precise control over the processing, extensive metering and with very high quality anti-aliasing filters and sample rate conversion. It's just what you want in a plugin like this. It's not intended to sound like analog tube gear or be more of a creative sound design tool, it's primarily made to be a high precision tool for mixing and mastering. Definitely worth the $15 price tag IMO, even though there are some really good free ones as well.
There hasn't been a free one released that has as high quality oversampling as StandardCLIP though. The best free one right now is probably Kazrog KClip Zero. Venn Audio FreeClip 2 would be the best free one, but it unfortunately has the same issue with the oversampling that v1 had (the anti-aliasing LP filter somehow doesn't completely block the harmonics at Nyquist, so there's some aliasing that still is getting bounced down into audible range). PeakEater by Vladyslav Voinov, which is based on FreeClip, therefore also has the exact same issue. Voxengo OVC-128 used to be the best free one, but it costs about $50 now.
@@nj1255 tl;dr
@@nj1255 I've been using PeakEater. I didn't' know it was based on FreeClip and didn't know they had OS issues. Thanks for teaching me something new!
Ngl I was very skeptical of what you were actually talking about until I heard the playback. The result is clear as day. Thanks for the cheat code 👍🏼
No worries, my pleasure!
"enjoy myself a bit too much" haha I love this guy
You should try this trick also (more “coloring”… but nice)
Emphasize - Deemphasize low end content into (and out of) first and softer clipper
Then control peaks using a harder one on full signal 😊❤
I use the hard clip function on StandardClip, it's in the drop down under soft clip. You mention that this is a comparison between hard and soft clipping but I only see soft clipping with different settings. Maybe there's something I'm missing? In all the examples the track labeled "soft" always has louder transients and louder rms, as can be seen on the plugin's fantastic output meters. Since we're clipping an entire song I'd say that volume matching would be really important here. I can hear differences.. just hard to tell how much of it is a volume difference. Great video, I'm going to have to experiment more with this plugin.
Man I've used Standard Clip for years, and have sworn by it to anyone who wouldn't listen:), but have always been stymied by that fucking slider! What does it do.. Glad you made this video, cause everyone else has no idea what it does.
wow thank u
This channel is a game changer...
Thanks man!
There you go. I often use SC at the start of my chain and have always used the % slider to start. But never confirmed what the % slider was doing under the hood. I treated it similar to the effect amount on the inflator. Cheers mate!
My pleasure
Love the SIR clipper they all sound pretty close I think some of the others are well overpriced. Thanks for finding more about this, good to learn more!
I got Dynone recently after watch you use it- now that’s a beast of a plugin!
Agreed Leapwing plugins are another level, I love stageone and rootone.
There are tons of great clippers with a soft clipping function, including Izotope's Maximizer, TDR's Limiter6 GE, and Newfangled's Saturate. Tons of options to play with for soft clipping :)
The thing is, Sony was doing this soft knee transfer function *30 years ago* in its limiter, with look-ahead. But was 16 bit i/0 only and no oversampling. The net result: upwards comp, raises overtones (and noise), often perceived as "warmth". (with the exception of aliasing IMD).
I really appreciate this video. I was always wondering why illangelo always use soft clip pro on the master bus. Now i get it.
alright so this sent me into a rabbit hole of my own. i use V-Clip , by the same folk that made free clip and it is probably the most flexible clipper i've seen so far. you can change the clipping algos per side (meaning positive and negative of the waveform) and set the ceiling for each of those individually . this essentially lets you do something similar to what you were doing with the Pro Clip section in standard clip but with a lot more control. using plugin doctor combinations of diff algos and ceilings for positive and negative sides of the waveform can give similar results with diff in detailing in midrange and top end along with some interesting results when you go ballistic. ended up making a few different presets and will be testing out the results of these this week.
I am a fan of vclip and free clip. But the OS on standard clip is better
I noticed your StandardCLIP is set at 4x OS in a few vids. What do you have it set at when you render?@@panorama_mastering
I use V-Clip as well and this sent me digging into the Custom panel lol. I'm curious how you set it up.
Very interesting feature. Might get this one. Thanks for the video. It's hard to see you pressing the solo button. I suggest you use some sign on screen so we can see more easily when you switch. Cheers
I know; I'm so sorry; I got lazy on the video edit and didn't zoom in like I usually do.
**Slaps self on back of head**
This stuff is gold! Thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience! One question I have is, when you find the level of "the body" of the track, would it work to use the RMS level that RX spits out, as opposed to guessing by looking at the waveform?
Great point! Yeap both methods could work. Ultimately you still need to audition it.
Would love to see a contrast and compare with the soft clip pro mode in Standard Clip and the Soft Clip Focus feature of the Ozone Maximizer.
Great video Mate!, you really blew my mind with this, I've been using Standard Clip for a couple of years now and I didn't knew this, thank you very much!. BTW, one question, how do you enable the "side metering things" on RX, the ones that you use to find the value of the body of your song? 👀
Thx for that one again! Nice videos as always! Just being watching videos from Baphometrix about the oversampling and ceiling in the Standardclip plugin : "The problem with oversampled clippers". I'm not a big fan of those method of shaving everything to be as LOUD as possible, but... it's always good to see how each engineer works.
It may serve you. Video a bit fastidious, but it makes sens at some point. If i got it right, the idea is to avoid unnecessary oversampling and "second" ceiling, to keep a transparent mix, and mostly save overall CPU. Mostly when using it on single tracks or busses... Oversampling doesn't seems to be always at its best on clippers or limiters.
By the way, do you think the ceiling is of any use if we are not using the oversampling option? Cause it creates some aliasing, and seems to be, mostly, if not only, for the overshoots... CREATED by the oversampling. Thx man for all those sharing jewels! Keep on shining!
I thinking you’re spot on with that point-I watched the same baphometrix video and had the same question you wrote here. It doesn’t seem that hard to me to get the same “ceiling” function just by using another instance of standard clip-hard clipping with no oversampling is, in my experience, a negligible additional cpu load. But more importantly, I didn’t really find myself in any situations where I wanted to use oversampling with clipping! In fact, 99% of the time, the ONLY difference I could hear was that the oversampling introduced aliasing… So for me, the “problem with oversampled clippers” is totally obviated.
Hey man - another great video! Did you mean -9.6 at 4m11s?
So I can figure out true peak, but how do I figure out where the body of the instrumentation is without izotope RX ?
The way the soft clipper works reminds me a little of a compressor - the MV2 - with its Low Level compression dial pushing the quieter parts up. Do you think of soft clipping as something more akin to compressing? And then later on before the limiter do you also tend to add a hard clipper to get more control?
This „pre processing rogue peak containment“ you do i do something similar using Kotelnikov and-or Drum Leveler by Sound Radix.
Ultra fast attack and release and it acts like an ultra fast leveler . Of course it has its limits but most times i find the results very transparent.
Ever use the Phase option in RX to further balance the peaks as far as they relate to each other R/L?
Explain?
@@boimesa8190 I tried and made a super long response and then YT gave me an error code and erased my whole message.
It’s in RX and its under “Phase” and will essentially balance the wave forms relative to the zero line to make perceived and measured loudness (in my opinion anyway) easier to achieve
You have to render once you measure using that little section of RX
I still prefer this over Gold Clip, straight to the point with precision.
Excellent tip. TH-cam is full of completely obvious tips flaunted as game-changing. It's good to see a genuinely insightful process explanation. SIR could probably do a better job in the UI to explain what's going on.
Thanks. Once I read the manual it made sense. But you’re right the UI could do a bit of work.
Haha - I subscribed just now because of 8:53. Cheers dude. I didn't know what it did either until now. :D
Can someone please explain:
This soft-clipping technique will still have the hard ceiling for the peaks as the hard-clipper, but what is it doing with the signal underneath the ceiling?
I also don’t understand the doubling part (-4dB to -2dB) 3:12
I used this method of clipping and the master soundet a bit smoother in my ears, also I didn´t need as much gain on the output.
Wonderful!
riccodiccoduung ...nice one!
really impressive video. Can you do a video on how to make mixes translate well?
Can you do this with kclip?
Hi! Am I wrong to assume it works in a similar way to Sonnox oxford-inflator?
Thanks for the video, some helpful insights there!
I was wondering if you knew if the % for the Soft Clip in Izotope Mazimizer work in a LINEAR or non-LINEAR fashion in relation to the threshold for the three modes (H, L, M)?
If it is non-LINEAR, how could the user calculate the dBs of reduction from the % for each mode?
Good stuff and well explained, thanks. I love StandardClip, but I'm not very good at using it to be honest.
Glad it was helpful!
I would heavily wouch for Newfangled Saturate. To me it has nicest hardcliping sound ever.
second that, I never like the standard clip sound, in the high freq it's not pleasant to my taste
I agree much prefer saturate!
Yea Saturate is the best one out here. Not a usual clipper plugin, much going under the hood
cleanest clipper out there in my opinion
It's pretty CPU heavy, one setting for over sampling, and less visual guides than SIR. Agree, it sounds good. I have both.
I've got Stranded Clip, and liked soft clip pro the best. For my audio I liked 10% saturation.
Not using it right at the minute as I got my new toys, Softube Clipper and Widener and Schwabe Gold Clip.
Awesome, thanks for sharing!
Would you recommend using this technique on my mixbus before I send to mastering? I'm always concerned that the mastering engineer will try applying even more clipping.
Hi, thanks for this amazing tutorial! Please could you explain- The tool that you are using to measure the gain difference in RX on the right-hand side of the waveform (the bit you can drag up and down when you click on it that shows you the db reading) I cannot find it in my version of RX7. Is there a way of showing it in the settings or is it a feature of later versions of RX? Thanks for yor time and keep up the amazing work! Kind regards Matt
Tried Airwindows clippers, Sir? Thanks for this!
this is exactly what got me thinking before. I mean I saw you and a handful of other youtubers using the hard clip function on your videos on this plugin before and felt weird why you didn't use the soft clip pro which is its strongest suit. Hard clip is basically the same for everything every and what makes ever little clipper plugin different is how they implement their soft clip algo. It's exactly like you explained in this video and I found out about it on the first day I got this plugin and been using it that way since. I think it's on the manual, no ?
EDIT : alright typed this halfway, you missed the manual. Lol. Okay if this blows your mind, then there's ASH that does it roughly 10 times sexier.
Haha wonderful! Great share and comment!
Great tutorial, I’m a blind producer and can’t fall along. Is there any chance you could create the presets for me? I use pro-tools and logic. I have soft limit by apagy initial clipper and the one by sir audio tools. I’m also a reggaeton artist if u want to do a track. Sounded amazing what I heard
Are you sure this is a good idea at the beginning of your chain? If you're adding saturation, EQ, inflation and Gullfoss, Soothe2, won't that introduce more peaks? Also, starting with a really squashed track, you are reducing all of the above processes the chance to interact with the full dynamics of the track before the limiter. Hmmm. I think it should stay before the limiter. Good info though, I struggled with that setting.
Yeap at the beginning. Yltimately this is a dynamics process. It minimizes dynamic range. I like doing this upfront so added harmonics, EQ or tonal shaping is free to be pushed and pulled from a controlled signal rather than driving tonal changes into a control medium
As far as i discovered percentage slider in SIR Standardclip, my masters finally come to an industry standard LUFS levels. However, sometimes it makes soft songs sound a bit too spiky and edgy, so i'm trying to be careful with that. It goes well on rock mixes, but r'n'b and pop shouldn't sound that abrasive, so i rather prefer to combine it with hard clipping and slightly pumped up limiting to keep the vibe smooth and deep.
Spot on; that's why it's important to not overuse it so it catches any of the samples in sustained BASS portions; check out my latest video; I detail it a bit better over there;
@@panorama_masteringSold out!😄 BTW love your channel. For a few years of research i've watched a lot of videos here, but most of the guys make the same topics and not to go in-depth review of their subjects. Your channel is like a fresh air for me, man. Thanks a lot for it!
I've owned this plugin for so long and never thought to even click the graph 🤣
Done!!
Still waiting for your Vocal Rider video 😬
Soft knee like in the classic Avid comp/limiter is similar in function.... is it not? oldy but a goody
Thank you for all that reading so I can just listen!
You are so welcome
Just found you. Just subscribed. Will follow for sure.
Welcome aboard!
I prefer Flatine as my go to clipper as i love the UI, does anyone know of the "Shape" on Flatline is the same thing as the "soft clip saturtor" slider ?
Go through plugin doctor :)
ok wait hold up. So I think i got it, its just a clean maximizer/saturation? You get loudness from the bottom but it will compress and soft clip the peaks so it doesnt rise too much?
Bangon
This plugin is insane I cant believe i got it for 18 dollars lmao@@panorama_mastering
Do you think the SIR Starndard Clip is the best Clipper?
nice
which RX plugin is that? I have a bunch of them but I've never seen that one where you can look at the peaks :/
Rx audio editor
@@panorama_mastering thanks mate. Biglove
Do you know how god damn useful that was?!
Yeap! It was a super a-ha moment for me!
I was wondering why you were using hard clipping before your limiter! I thought you just wanted to "hard clip" some individual peaks. I use soft clipping before my limiter, but I dial in the percentage which is the "knee" if I want more punch.
With soft clipping instead of hard, you can drive the signal a little more because it will round your peaks and make the low end sound more open if that's what you're going for. Hard clipping will add more punch. I use Newfangled Audio Saturate for this, highly recommended.
Spot on!
i use newfangle saturate, really have no idea about it tho. Can I emulate the standard clip stuff he did with newfangle? Or even with kazrogs kclip?
@@cholkymilkmirage4984You can use any clipper, I also like the T-Racks clipper, great sound.
@@cholkymilkmirage4984Yes you can, I like it because it is relatively transparent and even when it "destroys" the sound, it sounds good
Interesting, I always hard clip before the limiter, but sure I'd like to test this out at the beginning of the chain to see how the rest of gears interact with the transients.
Does anyone know how to activate these top and bottom dB bars around the waveform within RX10? Is it on all the versions?
Use the declippwr and it will visually appear!
Where do you put the soft clipper in the chain?
do you also clip your drums separately before? like thekick /snare?
Depending on the style sometimes, yes!