Does pushing GClips gain control impede your sound?

[Ice Man]

Well, like everyone else, I got turned onto the whole GClip thing when Slate shined light on it. Perhaps it's a flaw in my work flow, but when I get a mix sounding where I like, generally my faders are all low and I'm peaking nowhere near 0db. So, instead of just pushing up my bus faders and getting my gain that way, for a while I was just pushing Gclips' gain knob harder to make up the difference. Mind you, none of my transients were touching the clipping point at all with my added gain, but the harder I pressed while still in the clear clipping wise, the more my mix seemed like it began to suffer and weird midranges that were already cut out began reappearing. Anyone notice this or am I just crazy?

 

[lolzgreg]

I'm not big on GClip. It's really a different strokes for different folks kind of thing. I use GClip on all of my drum busses, but not on my master bus. I use Voxengo Elephant and I happen to get some pretty great transparent volume maximization.

 

[JBroll]

'Impede' your sound? From what?

If you're only wanting to add gain...push faders or put a dedicated boost (like an EQ) on the whole thing. Don't forget that you'll notice different things as you increase volume... you may have some weird nonsense going unnoticed by low volumes.

Jeff

 

[Yhanthlei]

Don't forget that you'll notice different things as you increase volume... you may have some weird nonsense going unnoticed by low volumes.

Jeff

This!

It's probably not gclip altering your sound, but the fact that it's, well, louder

 

[Fragle]

well, tbh i felt i noticed a similar thing. normally i tend to mix so the whole thing peaks around -6 -8 dbfs, so after some subtle 2bus compression you're good to go with only a few db boost on each gclip.
there are times where i end up with much quieter mixes, and those are the ones i find myself pushing gclip like 8db or more just to get the whole thing into the ballpark (no clipping involved yet, as the OP describes)....and the mix did indeed start to sound congested, at least felt that way. like as if high gain levels on gclip introduced some artifacts....dunno.
it's definitely not the loudness, though, as i turn down my speaker volume while i'm increasing the mix volume, so i essentially compare mix and master on the same relative level.

 

[JBroll]

Why use GClip when an ordinary gain boost will work exactly as expected?

Jeff

 

[amarshism]

Why not push your mix harder into the master bus?

 

[Fragle]

because sometimes you just have everything set just right, including send levels, effects etc, and well i just don't feel like grabbing all the faders and bringing them up when boosting the output of the whole thing has the same effect.
and well, technically you could use a dedicated gain boost in front of the gclips, but shouldn't the gclips gain control do the exact same thing? ok, apparently it doesn't, hence this thread.

 

[Charles J]

If you mix through a compressor, I'd just raise the output of the compressor so that GClip is 'seeing' a more normal level.

 

[soundsunderground]

Why not push your mix harder into the master bus?

1. In PT LE the master bus fader is pre the plugins. Pushing it harder will only clip the first plugin and slam other plugs ins after on the master buss.

2. Gclip has 2X oversampling which helps prevent aliasing.

 

[waltz mastering]

Why not push your mix harder into the master bus?

or, if your goal is trying to get more gain out of your mix, treat it as a separate process altogether. Bounce out the mix at conservative levels, at whatever your sample rate and bit depth it is at, and do a separate master session.

 

[FloridaRolf]

If it feels more and more weird when going for volume when mastering, you may have some problems with your mix that your current monitoring situation didn't reveal. Mastering involves more than just clipping & limiting, just running the mix through those two plug-ins with 8db gain can't really turn into a smooth master.
Well I missed the OPs point a bit but if you put 20 tracks together with a bit / much clipping (even if you can't hear it solo'd), it may cause the mud

 

[Ice Man]

As mentioned in the opening post, I realize I could just bump up the faders, but I just figured that the GClips gain would be clean up to the clipping point and it just doesn't seem so. It's just how my work flow eventually wound up and appears it needs a solution. I will most likely rely more on fader gain than Gclip from now on. It was just a small observation that seemed to always bug my ears. I realize that the added volume could in ways play tricks, especially how the reflected sound takes on the character of your space, but there was a noticeable difference between raising my monitor's volume to that level and pushing Gclips gain to a comparable volume. At least to my ears there was, but call me crazy.

 

[AerialThesis]

Stop using Gclip?

 

[MetalJonesy]

I'm not big on GClip. It's really a different strokes for different folks kind of thing. I use GClip on all of my drum busses, but not on my master bus. I use Voxengo Elephant and I happen to get some pretty great transparent volume maximization.

does Elephant softclip aswell? if not do you use softclipping on the master Greg?

 

[kev]

The general consensus was that it fucks itself a bit after about 7DB

 

[lolzgreg]

does Elephant softclip aswell? if not do you use softclipping on the master Greg?

No, it's just a brickwall limiter. I set the output gain to -.1 dB and just mix into it.

I've tried about nine different ways to "master" stuff, and definitely keep it in mind that I'm no professional mastering engineer by far, but I'm only using a compressor and Elephant, or just mixing VERY hot into Elephant, and I get all the volume I need and not a TRACE of digital clipping. I will not stand for audible clipping in my tracks.

I make sure when I mix that all of my final busses are nice and controlled so I can really work with the master bus compressor to maximize loudness.

 

[MetalJonesy]

hmm, ill have to give elephant a shot with maybe a bit of g clip before it and stick with my usual master buss comp settings!