Hey everyone

Am I doing it wrong if I ALWAYS(!) avoid red?

Sometimes I (accidentally) clip while working on sounddesign, then I get the impression that the sound is kinda bigger/rougher.. So i'm like, meh, I should try to avoid the red.. and try to achieve the same effect. But I'm not sure if that's actually right... I read somewhere that everyone clips once in a while(?).. that it isn't certainly a bad thing .. but to be honest I don't have a clue. I'm just avoiding red everywhere. Thoughts?

Clipping is definitely not always a bad thing. In fact, I would say it can be a very good thing on almost anything that's not chords. What you don't want to do, however, is have your sounds running hot into the master, that's going to cause you problems. To avoid this, you can take any common household limiting plugin like Ozone Maximizer, set its attack, release, lookahead, whatever, everything to zero and then limit away, it's essentially the same as clipping your master, and on top of adding grit to your sounds, it's a very nice way to get the perceived volume of your basses up and keep your levels in check. Just don't overdo it.

try to make your sounds, sounding good at a lower volume and never reach the 0 dB. so that way, you'll worry less about it while mixing.

This is the effect of digital distortion when played back under 32-bit floating point (where you are not necessarily losing the information, it's just not being reproduced by your speakers although it's influencing the sound) and when it is being rendered out to 16 or 24-bit audio. Everything above 0 is cut off, so it's no longer coloring the sound with the frequency information it used to have.

That's partly why I recommend AGAINST digital clipping and FOR distortion/waveshaping plugins - you can often replicate the same sort of dynamics and tonal characteristic of a clipped sound without having to redline the information. Clipping can have a good effect, when used effectively, but you need to remember that if you're not working with analog audio you can't do the same sort of warmth and saturation that you can by running a super hot signal into a tube compressor.

When youre distorting the sound with a Waveshaper, youre redlining the information, which gives you additional harmonics and chops off dynamics. It is the exact same thing as bouncing down a too hot signal to 16bit (no effect until 0 dBfs threshold is passed). Most distortion works by redlining the information and then doing something with it, so youre pretty much always doing the same thing, adding harmonics and coloring the sound. If you want it to sound more analog and warm like a valve, just use a rounder shape.

Waveshapers can do the exact same thing as just letting your sound hit 0 dBfs, so I thought that's what we were talking about all along. Whether you wanna get the clipping from bouncing the sound down to 16 bit or by using a Waveshaper is pretty much your choice to be honest, I just prefer Waveshapers because it works live without bouncing anything (result is the exact same thing).