KVR Audio

grillo · Post by **grillo** » Mon Apr 21, 2008 1:50 pm

I was watching one of those 'in the studio with' tutorial videos they have on the FM mag dvd and i found it weird that the guy there not only suggested clipping the track during mastering, he actually said it was pretty much kind of mandatory if you wanted to achieve that uber loud sound.

Granted it was some electronica dance breaks thing, but i still thought digital clipping was a no no.

Do you clip your track while mastering? And if yes, what's the best way to go about it? Just push the fader and listen?

bduffy · Post by **bduffy** » Mon Apr 21, 2008 3:00 pm

He must be talking about maximizing loudness with a limiter or perhaps putting some saturation (plugin) on the track as well. You should not digitally clip the master, I can see no advantage in that.

That being said, there have been many discussions here about clipping A/D converters (not your host's master bus), which is more of an advanced mastering engineer-type idea; but I doubt he's referring to that.

grillo · Post by **grillo** » Mon Apr 21, 2008 3:39 pm

see? that was my first reaction also, but he really meant hard clipping after everything, he even showed the chopped up waveform blocks in hiw wave editor to hammer the point home, saying if you don't do that it will really sound weak in the club next to other records.

Granted he is more of a dj than a trained engineer/producer, but still he was there teaching this as one of his tricks, so that made me wonder...

bduffy · Post by **bduffy** » Mon Apr 21, 2008 3:47 pm

Yeah? Well, it's hard to say for sure without seeing/hearing the video, but I would just never blast the digital bus. makes no sense.

What is he overdriving? is he literally turning up the fader of - what? His host? His mixing desk? until it clips? Sounds fishy, unless he's talking about the A/D thing. typical commercial masters are squashed to all f**k, this is normal; but there's only so far you can go before you get digital mush.

EDIT: Who is this dude? Maybe I can find the video on Youtube or some shit.

dan_s · Post by **dan_s** » Mon Apr 21, 2008 3:54 pm

What FM issue is it in? I might have it, I wanna learn how to clip tooo

Tp3 · Post by **Tp3** » Mon Apr 21, 2008 4:07 pm

I THINK he was referring to the term otherwise known as "Analog Clipping" which means driving your analog gear hard, assuming it has a greater overhead.

I cant imagine anyone who knows even a LITTLE, would risk distorting the audio by clipping the digital output.

bduffy · Post by **bduffy** » Mon Apr 21, 2008 4:13 pm

tonAP · Post by **tonAP** » Mon Apr 21, 2008 4:31 pm

I'd think analog clipping too

he really meant hard clipping after everything

@grillo are u sure 'bout it?

I'm tired about the 'loudness-war' blah blah, but at least it is ( was

) done with kinda brickwall limiter at the end of the story...
if the next 'fashion' will be 'hard clipping after everything'

I surrender!

Funkybot's Evil Twin · Mon Apr 21, 2008 4:38 pm

Clipping is the only way to get anywhere near modern commercial levels (hence why all commercial waveforms look like they've been clipped). Limiting simply doesn't bring you close and has far too many artifacts.

Now I wouldn't clip a jazz record, but the distortion that clipping creates actually kind of works for modern-rock/pop/hip-hop/electronic, and is less noticable than the pumping or other artifacts you'd get by limiting and trying to get similar levels.

You can either clip your converter, or get a plugin to do the job for you like GClip, Elephant, or T-Racks. Don't simply boost the level of the master fader though, that would be bad. BTW, if you want a free option, I like using GClip (with it's oversampling on) along with Chris Walton's VST oversampler. This is effectively a 4x oversampled GClip, which should greatly minimize the distortion.

Funkybot's Evil Twin · Mon Apr 21, 2008 4:41 pm

tonAP wrote: I'm tired about the 'loudness-war' blah blah, but at least it is ( was ) done with kinda brickwall limiter at the end of the story...
if the next 'fashion' will be 'hard clipping after everything'

I surrender!

ME's have been clipping for years and years now. If anything, they've just been quiet about it, letting people happily believe that they were acheiving those levels with brickwall limiters. Considering how fast the attack and release times of a Brickwall limiter are, you'd never get the transients of a hip-hop song through if you were limiting it hard enough to make it competitive with other commercial hip-hop releases [volume wise] and there would be all kinds of audible pumping if you tried.

dan_s · Post by **dan_s** » Mon Apr 21, 2008 4:42 pm

isn't this similar to this http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=209780

someone posted a picture of the waveform, the entire thing was clipped. Maybe it was on gearslutz, since the OP, posted it on every forum.

anyway, I don't like it, but someone does

Arksun · Post by **Arksun** » Mon Apr 21, 2008 4:44 pm

Funkybot's Evil Twin wrote:Clipping is the only way to get anywhere near modern commercial levels (hence why all commercial waveforms look like they've been clipped). Limiting simply doesn't bring you close and has far too many artifacts.

How the track is mixed, equed and compressed can also play a big part of ultimately how loud it can be percieved, any final limiting + subtle clipping is just one part of this process to achieving a greater loudness.

Personally I'd be quite happy for everyone to just turn their volume knobs up a bit higher and enjoy better dynamics with less distortion.

One problem in creating tracks for playing in clubs however is that, by half way through the night the dj's have already ramped the volume levels up to max on everything. So even if they put on your track which has better dynamics and punch, because everything else is limited to death, it just wont sound as loud, as the physical volume knob can't go any higher.

Sometimes it seems a necessary evil, I just wish a magic wand could be waved and all digital limiters just suddenly dissapear, our ears and overall enjoyment of music would be very thankful for it

Funkybot's Evil Twin · Mon Apr 21, 2008 5:02 pm

Hey Dszep, nice to see a local around here. I'm in Harrison, so I'm right in the neighborhood.

BTW, I don't like clipping but it's a necessary evil as far as I'm concerned. If a band can't afford to get something properly mastered, I'll generally use some M/S processing to widen the mix a bit, then clip the master enough so that I'm near commercial levels while not entirely destroying the mix. This practice developed from bands saying they didn't have the money to go somewhere good, but that they "found a guy who would master it cheap." Then coming back to me with crap results [either running the mix through the L2 and an EQ, or a Finalizer] that I'd end up having to redo for them.

Funkybot's Evil Twin · Mon Apr 21, 2008 5:14 pm

Arksun wrote:Sometimes it seems a necessary evil, I just wish a magic wand could be waved and all digital limiters just suddenly dissapear, our ears and overall enjoyment of music would be very thankful for it

Agreed. What amazes me is that the film industry gets the loudness thing. DVDs are all mastered so that the audio is almost constantly below 0dbfs, unless there needs to be something loud for effect (like an explosion). It's almost ironic that the film industry understands how dynamics should function in audio better than the music industry. Oh well.

tonAP · Post by **tonAP** » Mon Apr 21, 2008 5:15 pm

..me waiting for @debra1rlo picture, you know:

'Aw Jeez'

clipping the master