Listen twice as often as you speak.

They're telling you to avoid clipping because you really don't want to lose information or introduce unwanted distortion. You want you signal to come in at a decent level, but you don't want them to get too hot. Once that clipping is baked into the audio file, it's there forever. So when recording audio or mixing in anything lower than 32-bit floating point, where going over 0 = Gone Forever™, you should heed their advice and not let your master fader ever go above 0 dB.

This is different from purposefully clipping something because of the sound it produces, and the perceived loudness increase that results. Anything that someone says "Always Do X" or "Never Do Y" should have a giant qualifier after it that says "Unless you WANT that effect." Adding a clipping plugin like Kazrog's KClip to your drums bus, for example, can increase the apparent loudness without damaging the sound quality or increasing the signal level, because there isn't that much critical information to lose and the distortion is often masked by how short and percussive drum hits tend to be. Here's a pretty good example of what I'm referring to.

I personally have KClip sitting on my master channel as part of my loudness chain, and usually get get it between 3-6 dB of loudness increase without any audible degradation of sound quality. Keep in mind that these do not make the OUTPUT clip, because then there will be distortion when it's sent to my speaker cones and I don't want that. This clipper is sitting before my master limiter, which has a ceiling of -0.3 dB. That way the only clipping I have is the clipping I chose to put there.

Pretty much anything by Noisia. I'd check out their newest release, Outer Edges.

I appreciate you posting this, but looking through the link you posted I'm very concerned about the legality of those downloads and the potential security risks from all those shortened links on the site. I'm going to remove the URL and lock this thread, but if you think that it's not dangerous feel free to PM me and we can probably open the thread back up.

Light percussion (congos and hand drums, shakers or maracas, and brushed snares or side sticks are some good examples) playing a simple pattern with a lot of reverb and/or delay can provide space and atmosphere, while continuing to drive your track forward through the softer sections.

Hi everyone!

You might have already noticed, but earlier this week I was appointed as a new moderator of the forum! Most of the other moderators and the site administrators are all kind of busy being professional musicians doing cool things right now, so there are certain things that can and cannot be done until things start to slow down. I'm still in school, so I have some spare time to make this site a bit cleaner.

I'm not allowed to ban any users, so I cannot prevent spam accounts from posting as of right now. I've been checking the reports consistently, and have removed all the spam posts I've found so far - if you see any new ones, please report them!

I'm also not allowed to create new subforums, so even though I know there are certain areas we'd like to see added that might take a bit of time. In the meanwhile, please let me know if there's anything else I can do to make your time on the forum easier.

Don't pitch kicks, IMO. Either use a kick that's already pitched, or layer some high passed topkicks over a pure sine wave sub, or a super lowpassed square or a triangle if you wanna get really crazy. Also be aware of what key you're in - certain sub bass frequencies are perceived better than others.


Once you hit D#1 or E1 on this chart, a lot of the audible tone of the sub itself starts to fade and become harder to hear - anything lower you'll also be struggling with controlling that sub bass when mixing. When you get to A#1 or B1, you're pushing the upper limits of the sub bass range and are losing a lot of that weight and power that you're looking for. Keep that chart in mind, both for your kick and for your sub bass.

I'm not a huge fan of clippers, mostly because I haven't found one that I like.

Kazrog's KClip is probably one of the best clipping plug-ins I've seen under $100. It's only $20, and buying it now gets you pre-orderered for the next version that's coming out later this year.

EDIT cuz I forgot to respond to OP:

A good way to not crush your dynamics while still improving loudness is to stack multiple compressors, limiters, and clippers that nudge the perceived loudness up little by little.

In traditional sound engineering, you're taught that it's better to have multiple compressors working a little bit than to have one compressor working a lot to be as transparent as possible in your processing. Two 2:1 compressors with differing attack/release times will function just like one 4:1 compressor in how it affects the dynamic range of the sound, while leaving half the footprint because neither is really doing all that much to the sound and they're not stacking on top of each other.

The same works for limiters, which are just brickwall compressors. Having three limiters (or two limiters and a clipper) pushing 2 dB of loudness will give you the equivalent of one limiter pushing 6 dB, and retains a lot more of the original signal.