Shave a little off at a time

Yesterday we talked about using two limiters in series to achieve a more resilient limiting sound. Today, here’s another strategy in that vein: use a clipper before your limiter!

Clippers do what it sounds like; they shave off the tops of waveforms. I’m oversimplifying, and there are lots of different clippers with lots of different algorithms under the hood, but that’s the basic idea. (And this is extremely different from a brickwall limiter, which is a compressor with an infinite ratio and an attack time of 0 ms.)

There is a LOT of garbage transient information in play by the time you get to your master bus. Pretty much every signal you could imagine recording has a completely useless spike of information in the first 1-2 ms of the waveform; add those all together across all the tracks in your session, and that’s a lot of extra transient information coming at your master bus limiter! This can cause the limiter to overreact, overlimit, and generally make your mix sound jumbled and congested.

(This is one of the reasons that people love the sound of recording to tape: among other nonlinear artifacts that it imparts, tape acts sort of like a clipper, eating transients. Nom nom. Extremely helpful!)

Putting a clipper before your master bus limiter is a fantastic way to help deal with the garbage transients in your mix. The clipper shaves off a user-controllable amount of the peakiest transient information — leaving the limiter with less work to do, meaning that it can do less limiting, meaning that it will handle your mix much more cleanly. It can be shocking how much additional depth and clarity this little one-two combo move can give a mix.

I learned about a clipper called StandardCLIP on a mastering forum many years ago, and I would recommend it wholeheartedly for use on the master bus. It costs $25, and its interface looks like it’s from the late 90s (not in a bad way, just dated), so it could be tempting to dismiss it as not being “pro grade.” But don’t be fooled — this is an absolute secret weapon, fantastic-sounding, mastering-grade clipper. For $25! An absolute steal.

I like to use StandardCLIP in Soft Clip Classic mode with the oversampling at 8x; I adjust the Clip slider, which is just a threshold slider by another name, until I’m shaving off an amount of peaks that decongests the mix in the limiter without blunting the mix’s impact. (Bypassing and un-bypassing the clipper with your eyes closed can help you hear whether you’re on the mark with this.)

Two bits — jamie

p.s. Happy Thanksgiving to my USA people! I hope this finds you happy, comfortable, and warm. I’m grateful to be connected in this way with all of you. 🖤