Mate i just dont know how to express this awesome feeling,after months and month dealing with this issue.... I litteraly try it today. I owe you so much!

Standard Clip is one of those plug ins that just get better and better the longer you own it.

Best channel for real Mixing and Mastering, never any BS, never talks without knowing what he's going to say and you don't seem to make videos just to have an upload like some of the other channels on here.

Nobody reads the manual! We just wait for people like you to enlighten us. LOL.

I'm not one to leave comments but this popped up just as I finished a master, decided to change the soft clip settings using this method. Honestly mind blowing how it adds depth instantly. thanks man

I was just watching an AU5 vid about this experimental FFT based "multiband" compressor called Spectral Compressor, and when he showed one use case he found for it, I immediately thought of you! This thing is wild, you can use it as a clipper, but as it can compress with an infinite ratio with 0 attack and 0 release time, and subsequently distort each FFT band separately (if set to as low an FFT window size as your PC can handle, and to have as little overlap of the FFT windows as possible) this means digital clipping with essentially zero intermodulation distortion!! It's essentially a multiband compressor with close to infinite bands... Other VSTs employ this tech behind the scenes too (like the Sonible smart comp and I think sooth), but this thing has so so many other controls and interesting use cases, where as smart comp etc. are designed to take away control and automate the processing for you, this thing is the polar opposite and wants you to get fully hands on with every variable. It can do exactly what sooth can just with more controls (al be it with more time spent getting to the result, making these other smart processors still have their place tbh). You can use it to take the S/C signal from another sound source, imprint it so it removes them frequencies from the main sound, invert the phase polarity and overlay it on the original signal, creating a delta signal, and then have only the frequencies that are in both sounds play and have one sound with the tonal characters of another and a bunch of other really really crazy stuff, it's really wild. It's free as well! A bit fiddly to install as it's a github project, but well worth it if you really want to get granular with your processing. They have a bunch of other cool looking free plugs too, I've not had time to check the others out yet though, as as soon as he said intermodulation distortion free clipping, I had to come over here haha!.

I tend to favor hard clipping on grittier sounding music because as I understand it, hard clipping tends to sound more transparent up until it indroduces a really ugly sounding distortion. Soft clipping sounds smoother and more forgiving to me, but introduces distortion at the threshold. This sounds gorgeous on mixes that have higher peaking transients, but can get to overkill quick when the softer knee starts eating into the rms. Also all saturator plugins are soft clippers of some kind. Tube saturation tends to have asymmetric transfer curves, where as symmetric function only introduce third order harmonics. That’s why pushing anything hard into a hard clipper makes it sound essentially like a square wave

Every mix that I send you has the Pro settings on my 'All Drum Bus'. Glad to see you sharing more helpful tips! Thank you!

WOW Nicholas ! that is freaking amazing! clear trensients and very OPEN sounding , thank you !!!! you got a sense of dynamics and also gained that crunch on the top of the trensients that pokes outta the speaker. reminded me a bit of luca's method of using Pro-G as an expender, before clipping to get a sense of dynamics - in a different and inovative way of course. thank you again

Awesome thanks so much for this vid // been using standard clip since a year 😅 was simply hard clipping before the limiter - your analysis is pure gold

Thank you so much for sharing this, the results speaks for itself. Cheers man!!!

Great video as always!

Cheers Nic these videos are really helping my mixs

Finally, someone made sense of that dial. I can hear clear differences, particularly when trying to get an already loud source up to competitive levels. I read the manual but it really didn't click, until ... Thanks a lot!

This is awesome. Thank you for sharing with us!! 🙏🏻🙌🏻

Dude you are hilarious. Thank you for reading the manual and sharing xD that's so cool

I´m gonna try this method on my next mastering session. Thank you for sharing your discoveries :-)

Just love people who make me think about doing things I've done the same for ages suddenly want to do it differently.

Amazing content. Dude you’re an inspiration! Thanks for that ending.

thanks for walking through this. I had the same question about the percentage slider as well! Lol. much appreciated.

love ur vibes and the knowledge u shared with us. and it's much better to listen to a human being capable to talk the talk while walking the walk without the fast edits and adhd bs. subbed!

I just learned how to use limiters because of you, and I love using the soft clipper because it keeps that thump in the low end. I have a friend that was hounding me about how I was smashing my low end into my limiter, you definitely helped me out!

Well i'll be damned. I did not know that. Fun to discover this with you. Can tell you're excited haha. I'm gonna try this on EP i'm working on right now. Cheers

i appreciate your visual cues for how to set up ceiling and softclipping amount. I agree it can help to see the amount of reduced peak levels in the waveform. i always use v-clip for that. has a builtin oscilloscope. but for the softclipping amount I prefer to go by ear. cause the softer the transfercurve is the more distant it sounds, which is why I often prefer a rather hard clipping, but ofc that makes the transitions between dry and distorted more noticable, which is also not cool

Great video! Thanks man :)

Thanks a lot for another great tip! Exactly at the right time 🙏👍👍👍

A HUGE thank YOU!!!

Excellent, thanks!

Really helpful advice! I too found that clipping later in the chain affects transient shape a bunch (that we work so hard to control). Clipping upfront's better. because it really reduces how much work the limiters and compressors downline have to do. The technique in this video lets me "have my cake" by compressing the top few Dbs and leaving the body untouched.

Thank you

Brilliant, thanks!

Wo that sound so goooood, crazy

A really great share, thank you. So nice to get some clarity on what that goddam percentage slider actually does in the pro mode 🙂Looking forward to trying it out on groups in a mix too. Your channel and insights are fantastic.

I like sine folding my kick and sidechained bass together, kinda does the same thing, but i think sinefolding sounds cool and kinda transparent. If you don't have fast enough transients on your kick og drums in general, transientshaping, or compression adjusting the attack according to how fast or slow transient you want before clipping/waveshaping. I like to exaggerate the transients so the transient of my kick(for example) gets more distorted than the tail of the kick which is especially helpful if you're like me and like muffled 808-like kicks without much high frequencies in the transients.

Ngl I was very skeptical of what you were actually talking about until I heard the playback. The result is clear as day. Thanks for the cheat code 👍🏼

I started my mixbus-chain with the Standard Clip w/ soft clip at 50% just as an overal setting for a vibe I liked, but I'm going to try Soft Clip Pro and your more measured approach for sure!

What you seem to pay zero attention to is the fact that, when you compare the "soft pro" clipping transfer curve (in Plugin Doctor or whatever it is) to the hard clipping transfer curve, the "soft pro" line up to the threshold is off to the left of the hard clipping transfer curve. This means that even below the threshold, there is already a volume boost i.e. the volume of the signal going out is louder than it was going into the processor. So it doesn't just clip, it also boosts "into" the clipping part, which is a no-no because it alters the signal in ways it shouldn't. In typical soft clippers e.g. using the hyperbolic tangent, the transfer curve will always be "inside" the linear hard clipping transfer curve, even if the input is boosted "into" the clipping. The ideal would be to stay fully linear i.e. "on" the hard clipping transfer curve until the "clipping range" begins, in which the peaks are squashed.

"enjoy myself a bit too much" haha I love this guy

I really appreciate this video. I was always wondering why illangelo always use soft clip pro on the master bus. Now i get it.

Man I've used Standard Clip for years, and have sworn by it to anyone who wouldn't listen:), but have always been stymied by that fucking slider! What does it do.. Glad you made this video, cause everyone else has no idea what it does.

Excellent that you point this out. Now try staging the soft clipping with varying transfer curves the same way on especially on the heavy transient elements earlier in the mix to simulate pushing into transformers. Even try putting one clipper berfore your 2-bus processing and then again before your limiter to emulate D2A, outboard soft xlipping and then A2D. Better low end and overall body. Prove me wrong 😜

to easily A/B (hard vs soft) using the soft clip pro algo is to: .. leave the clip ceiling at the same value and for the soft clip, use the Input level to bring back the level (25% is -3, 50% is -6, 75% is -9 dB etc ) IMO what makes this clipper better in most cases than others is the detailed options we have the OS menu!

nice shave bro, looking fresh !!

Thanks for sharing ⚡️🤝🏻

Wow, what a difference!

The thing is, Sony was doing this soft knee transfer function *30 years ago* in its limiter, with look-ahead. But was 16 bit i/0 only and no oversampling. The net result: upwards comp, raises overtones (and noise), often perceived as "warmth". (with the exception of aliasing IMD).

it's basically a tanh(x) function, the most basic saturator you can build

There are tons of great clippers with a soft clipping function, including Izotope's Maximizer, TDR's Limiter6 GE, and Newfangled's Saturate. Tons of options to play with for soft clipping :)

great info!

OK. So, you are taking the amplitude delta between the loudest peak (-5.6) and the average loudest level of the rest of the music (-9.6) which is 4 dB and telling the clipper that the max ceiling for just the amplitude between -9.6 and -5.6 should be -7.6. Is that right? And the closer the amplitude gets to the actual peak of -5.6, the more clipping gets applied to that amplitude - so a transient of -5.6 will be soft-clipped to -7.6 but a transient of -6.6 will clipped even more softly/gradually. Is that right?!!

You should try this trick also (more “coloring”… but nice) Emphasize - Deemphasize low end content into (and out of) first and softer clipper Then control peaks using a harder one on full signal 😊❤

There you go. I often use SC at the start of my chain and have always used the % slider to start. But never confirmed what the % slider was doing under the hood. I treated it similar to the effect amount on the inflator. Cheers mate!

I use the hard clip function on StandardClip, it's in the drop down under soft clip. You mention that this is a comparison between hard and soft clipping but I only see soft clipping with different settings. Maybe there's something I'm missing? In all the examples the track labeled "soft" always has louder transients and louder rms, as can be seen on the plugin's fantastic output meters. Since we're clipping an entire song I'd say that volume matching would be really important here. I can hear differences.. just hard to tell how much of it is a volume difference. Great video, I'm going to have to experiment more with this plugin.

Great video Mate!, you really blew my mind with this, I've been using Standard Clip for a couple of years now and I didn't knew this, thank you very much!. BTW, one question, how do you enable the "side metering things" on RX, the ones that you use to find the value of the body of your song? 👀

Love the SIR clipper they all sound pretty close I think some of the others are well overpriced. Thanks for finding more about this, good to learn more! I got Dynone recently after watch you use it- now that’s a beast of a plugin!

wow thank u

Very interesting feature. Might get this one. Thanks for the video. It's hard to see you pressing the solo button. I suggest you use some sign on screen so we can see more easily when you switch. Cheers

Good stuff.

The way the soft clipper works reminds me a little of a compressor - the MV2 - with its Low Level compression dial pushing the quieter parts up. Do you think of soft clipping as something more akin to compressing? And then later on before the limiter do you also tend to add a hard clipper to get more control?

Hey man - another great video! Did you mean -9.6 at 4m11s?

So I can figure out true peak, but how do I figure out where the body of the instrumentation is without izotope RX ?

Hi, thanks for this amazing tutorial! Please could you explain- The tool that you are using to measure the gain difference in RX on the right-hand side of the waveform (the bit you can drag up and down when you click on it that shows you the db reading) I cannot find it in my version of RX7. Is there a way of showing it in the settings or is it a feature of later versions of RX? Thanks for yor time and keep up the amazing work! Kind regards Matt

This channel is a game changer...

really impressive video. Can you do a video on how to make mixes translate well?

I used this method of clipping and the master soundet a bit smoother in my ears, also I didn´t need as much gain on the output.

Thanks for the video, some helpful insights there! I was wondering if you knew if the % for the Soft Clip in Izotope Mazimizer work in a LINEAR or non-LINEAR fashion in relation to the threshold for the three modes (H, L, M)? If it is non-LINEAR, how could the user calculate the dBs of reduction from the % for each mode?

Haha - I subscribed just now because of 8:53. Cheers dude. I didn't know what it did either until now. :D

@panorama_mastering I would love to see a contrast and compare with the soft clip pro mode in Standard Clip and the Soft Clip Focus feature of the Ozone Maximizer. It seems like the Soft Clip Focus in Ozone is a very similar idea to the Soft Clip Pro mode in StandardClip but with the ability to use a sort of dry/wet mix with it. Would you agree or am I off about that?

This „pre processing rogue peak containment“ you do i do something similar using Kotelnikov and-or Drum Leveler by Sound Radix. Ultra fast attack and release and it acts like an ultra fast leveler . Of course it has its limits but most times i find the results very transparent.

This stuff is gold! Thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience! One question I have is, when you find the level of "the body" of the track, would it work to use the RMS level that RX spits out, as opposed to guessing by looking at the waveform?

Can someone please explain: This soft-clipping technique will still have the hard ceiling for the peaks as the hard-clipper, but what is it doing with the signal underneath the ceiling? I also don’t understand the doubling part (-4dB to -2dB) 3:12

Can you do this with kclip?

I still prefer this over Gold Clip, straight to the point with precision.

Hi! Am I wrong to assume it works in a similar way to Sonnox oxford-inflator?

alright so this sent me into a rabbit hole of my own. i use V-Clip , by the same folk that made free clip and it is probably the most flexible clipper i've seen so far. you can change the clipping algos per side (meaning positive and negative of the waveform) and set the ceiling for each of those individually . this essentially lets you do something similar to what you were doing with the Pro Clip section in standard clip but with a lot more control. using plugin doctor combinations of diff algos and ceilings for positive and negative sides of the waveform can give similar results with diff in detailing in midrange and top end along with some interesting results when you go ballistic. ended up making a few different presets and will be testing out the results of these this week.

Ever use the Phase option in RX to further balance the peaks as far as they relate to each other R/L?

My king, a question. Should I put the soft clipper after the compressor? Or when I put the soft clipper in, I don't put the compressor in?

Would you recommend using this technique on my mixbus before I send to mastering? I'm always concerned that the mastering engineer will try applying even more clipping.

Where do you put the soft clipper in the chain?

Thx for that one again! Nice videos as always! Just being watching videos from Baphometrix about the oversampling and ceiling in the Standardclip plugin : "The problem with oversampled clippers". I'm not a big fan of those method of shaving everything to be as LOUD as possible, but... it's always good to see how each engineer works. It may serve you. Video a bit fastidious, but it makes sens at some point. If i got it right, the idea is to avoid unnecessary oversampling and "second" ceiling, to keep a transparent mix, and mostly save overall CPU. Mostly when using it on single tracks or busses... Oversampling doesn't seems to be always at its best on clippers or limiters. By the way, do you think the ceiling is of any use if we are not using the oversampling option? Cause it creates some aliasing, and seems to be, mostly, if not only, for the overshoots... CREATED by the oversampling. Thx man for all those sharing jewels! Keep on shining!

Tried Airwindows clippers, Sir? Thanks for this!

Great tutorial, I’m a blind producer and can’t fall along. Is there any chance you could create the presets for me? I use pro-tools and logic. I have soft limit by apagy initial clipper and the one by sir audio tools. I’m also a reggaeton artist if u want to do a track. Sounded amazing what I heard

Good stuff and well explained, thanks. I love StandardClip, but I'm not very good at using it to be honest.

Excellent tip. KZfaq is full of completely obvious tips flaunted as game-changing. It's good to see a genuinely insightful process explanation. SIR could probably do a better job in the UI to explain what's going on.

riccodiccoduung ...nice one!

I prefer Flatine as my go to clipper as i love the UI, does anyone know of the "Shape" on Flatline is the same thing as the "soft clip saturtor" slider ?

I tend to do multiband treatment on my tracks, where I hard clip the upper mids and/or highs, and only saturate the low end. This way the low end remains pretty clear without introducing some unwanted harmonics.

I would heavily wouch for Newfangled Saturate. To me it has nicest hardcliping sound ever.

Still waiting for your Vocal Rider video 😬

Soft knee like in the classic Avid comp/limiter is similar in function.... is it not? oldy but a goody

Do you think the SIR Starndard Clip is the best Clipper?

I've owned this plugin for so long and never thought to even click the graph 🤣

I've got Stranded Clip, and liked soft clip pro the best. For my audio I liked 10% saturation. Not using it right at the minute as I got my new toys, Softube Clipper and Widener and Schwabe Gold Clip.

nice

Thank you for all that reading so I can just listen!

Interesting, I always hard clip before the limiter, but sure I'd like to test this out at the beginning of the chain to see how the rest of gears interact with the transients. Does anyone know how to activate these top and bottom dB bars around the waveform within RX10? Is it on all the versions?

what song is that?? i need it

READING HELPS!

I don’t understand any of that but that’s nearly identical to how I’ve always set standard clip

which RX plugin is that? I have a bunch of them but I've never seen that one where you can look at the peaks :/