Snare clipping question

[Aaron Smith]

I am aware that clipping the snare during mastering is a good thing. I have been involved in many discussions here about this, but what I still haven't grasped, is if there is any advantage at all to using an actual clipper plug-in instead of simply pushing the master fader of the DAW (Pro Tools in my case) to the point that the snare transients get clipped. Does a plug-in do something different, something "cleaner"?

 

[JBroll]

No, but getting it out of the way quicker does allow you to try and minimize the apparent clipping whatever way you want to try... as with guitar, the hissy shit can be low-passed away if you really feel like going lo-fi on the thing, or you can just dip any range that seems to be full of nasties. On top of that, you can generally run compressors harder before you get 'pumping' once you've tamed the hits a bit. Gclip also has some 'resampling' thing that seems to make stuff cleaner, but I don't know how it works so I won't comment - give it a try, I guess.

Jeff

 

[Omega_Void]

Clipper plugs generally have a softer knee to the clipping, which somewhat reduces the high freq crap.
Some (eg T-Racks, GClip, & others...) let you determine how soft the knee is.
The resampling on GClip will make it cleaner because the plug is not just chopping the tops off (as overloading your DAW master would), it's actually reshaping the higher-level portions of the waveform, so resampling allows it to average a more "accurate" final output. GClip actually graphically displays the transfer curve.
Also the behaviour of the plug on the flattened tops of the waves differs from plug to plug - eg SweetBoy's Volcano leaves the tops flat, Voxengo's Elephant seems to drop every other sample a notch for the duration of clipping, so the output will not be DC...some step down each sample one notch.
You can see the effect by zooming in vertically with WaveLab.
BTW, I don't think having the plug avoid DC on the peaks is important if you plan to dither the final track as that would break up the DC anyway...

 

[LSD-Studio]

Has anyone found a good vst-clipper for OS X yet?

 

[Aaron Smith]

Thanks for the replies, guys. Definitely helpful information.

Has anyone found a good vst-clipper for OS X yet?

Great question! I don't want to buy the T-Racks mastering bundle just for the clipping capabilities...

 

[greyskull]

shit...
ive actually got t racks and never installed it (came with about 500 other cds with pro tools)

 

[LSD-Studio]

now that you're saying it.....
same here together with amplitube and other stuff
problem solved, thanks.

 

[Aaron Smith]

Alright, one more question... Instead of just clipping the snares within the DAW, would it sound different at all to send the song out an analog output, then back in again right away and clip the snares on input? Would that be clipping the A/D converters or would that be doing the exact same thing as clipping the master fader from inside the DAW? Anyway, it sounds like it's probably a bad idea (at least from a signal degradation point of view), haha, but I'm sure someone else knows for sure.

 

[JBroll]

It would be clipping your AD converters if you sent it out at a non-clipping level from the DAW and boosted it elsewhere (with an outboard box or by raising gain some other way before AD conversion), it would be clipping your DAW if your master fader was set to a clipping level and possibly by the converters both ways (I don't know your rig well enough to say how many would clip) - unless you have some very nice converters, don't even worry about it. It'll likely sound like ass, and you'd be better off using GClip or something similar. Hell, I'd be interested in seeing how they sounded run through a Pod with no speaker simulation, or Guitar Rig, or something like that, so unless you feel like trying that I'll grab a clip or two.

Jeff