Great question. The answer is Yes, but not for the same reasons. With analog gear that use VU meters, going into the red here and there will saturate the signal in a nice way, and in different ways depending on what type of gear you're using (preamp, compressor, tube, solid state, etc.), and the audio signal will not be truncated the same way as a clipped digital audio signal. In digital audio, when when a recorded or bounced signal clips/peaks it means you've run out of 0's, meaning the signal is composed of all 1's. You can't go any higher, because the signal has maxed out the bit depth. Therefore, this would result in audible distortion in the signal; but not in a nice way like analog saturation. HOWEVER, in modern DAWs, the resolution of the mixing engine is often 32-bit or 64-bit. Meaning that you can actually clip the signal by much more than +6dBFS, and you can simply reduce the volume in some way to recover the clip. There are many ways to do this -- pull down all channels in the mix, pull down the stereo out, pull down the master VCA, add a gain plugin to the stereo out and reduce the gain, etc. A 64-bit system will give you something like ~250+dB above normal clipping level (not sure about the exact number, but it's high), but that's not to say that you shouldn't watch your clips. If your stereo out is clipping when you bounce your recording at 16-bit or 24-bit, the down-conversion will truncate transients in the mix--causing the mix to sound less detailed and punchy, and can also result in audible distortion where the signal is truncated. So in general, it's not always a bad thing for individual channels in your DAW to clip a bit here and there, but it's generally never a good idea for the stereo out to clip. Typically I shoot for around -6dBFS on the stereo out to leave some headroom for final mastering plugins on the stereo out.

@@MusicTechHelpGuy Terrific answer. Very appreciated. See you in the next video!

Yep! Just switch it over to stereo pan and you’re good!