hey everyone, this is Bathmetrics. Welcome to episode 20 of Mixing Loud with Clip to Zero. [Music] In this video, I'm going to expand on the difference between using a clipper versus using a limiter to control your peaks. For those of you that haven't seen this whole series yet, if you're dropping in for the first time on this video, this is part of an entire series on the Clip to Zero technique. If you haven't seen any of these yet, you may want to catch up because I'm assuming you understand a lot of the concepts and terminology I'll be throwing around in this video. And for those of you who have been watching this series, this is kind of an extended part two of my advanced clipping episode where I talked about replacing K-Clip with either Newfangled Saturate or Track Limit instead. In this video, I'm really going to be focusing on Track Limit as a limiter and how it operates differently from a clipper and why sometimes you would choose to use a limiter instead of

a hard clipper for your peak control, especially at buses, but maybe also on individual tracks. Okay, so to get right into the content of this video, I have a standard project template, and I already have a bunch of predefined sounds set up in it, like a nice clear piano for capturing chords. I have this pluck sound for capturing melody riffs real quick, and this pluck is fairly aggressive sounding, and everything's loud. The kick and snare are already really loud, so this is like easily a loudness or level kick and snare. And if anything, I tend to pull them down from this point, but you've been hearing this kick and snare all throughout this series because I've used it in a couple other sample projects just to show what super loud mixes can sound like. So here is the kick and the snare by themselves just to remind you what they sound like [Music]. And there's a massive amount of clipping going on where the kick and the snare sum together. This is a mid-tempo style kick and snare.

and there's a huge amount of clipping happening at the drums bus. That's massive summing, but they still sound good together because the snare is set up to be able to do this without [Music] without sounding, you know, horrible. Okay, so when I set up a song, when I have an idea, I will often come in and just record it really quick. If it's a melodic idea, I'll just use this default pluck sound, and if it's a chord idea, I'll use a default chord sound. And I just capture ideas really quick, and I don't care too much about how it sounds, whether I'm hearing clipping, etc., etc. And then I eventually replace those placeholder sounds with different sounds playing the same MIDI riff. So I'm jumping you a little ahead in the project because when I was fine-tuning the ducking for a given melodic idea, I saw a good example of showing you the difference between a clipper and a limiter. So that's where we're dropping in. I came in and originally

just had a little riff, little idea that I wanted to capture, and it was this pluck. [Music] Nothing fancy, okay? Just an idea, just a melodic idea I wanted to get down real quick. And if we now sum this pluck with the kick and the snare, and let me turn the duckers back on. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Okay, you can probably hear a little clipping when the kick operates at the same time as the pluck. And down here, you can kind of see what's going on. The pluck isn't super transient. This dark blue pattern is the pluck itself, and it's got a few little transient spikes, just the nature of how it's set up, but it's not overly transient, right? But when we layer it in with the kick and the snare, there is some overlap in this area right here, okay? And that overlap, especially on, you know, some of the pluck hits, can be a little problematic because there's some summing that's happening here.

and you can see that those peaks are going way over zero. These white lines are zero right here, and so something's got to clip that off and bring the entire mix back down to the zero line, which is going to look like this. That's what it looks like when it's clipped. Let's zoom in a little bit on that, okay? So we can see that, you know, when it was just the kick here, right, the kick was already clipped, but it sounded okay by itself, even with this clipped amount on this section. But as soon as we add the pluck in on top of that, where they're tending to overlap a little bit at the tail of the kick, then we end up with, you know, these little squared-off sections you're seeing all along this part of the kick, okay? So back to the sum. Let's look at this a little more holistically again for a second. Why do I have this pluck sound overlapping this kick, and why are we hearing this clipping here? So let's do one other thing. Let's mute the

snare out, so you're just seeing the kick and the uh and the plucky sound [Music]. And I have to turn off the snares, so this looks right to you [Music]. All right, so the reason this is happening, if I go to my duckers on the midline where I'm actually ducking this pluck to the kick, this is being done right here. Uh, when I set the pluck far enough out that it's not conflicting with the kick [Music]. Right now, there's no summing on top of the kick, which is already using up the full range to zero dB full scale, right? Of course, this sounds too gappy, right? So, a lot of times, if you're gonna, depending on what you're trying to do, some melodies, uh, need to have a much shorter ducking slice or they sound gappy like that. So, you know, when I fine-tune the ducking slice, as you keep bringing it inward, you're going to see that this pluck, um, this pluck starts moving in on the

orange part of the kick tail, and they're going to start summing together and making peaks above zero. So, let's watch the sum as I bring this inward. [Music] So, that sounds [Music] bad. Still too gappy. Still too gappy. [Music] Almost there. [Music] Okay, now I can live with that amount of ducking slice. That doesn't make the pluck sound overly gappy, especially once other things are brought in. But, of course, you can see that now because the pluck is very much overlapping the kick, and we're really only avoiding, especially here at the beginning, we're really only avoiding the most transient part of the kick in the first part of its, you know, tail section. But this overlap is kind of unavoidable if we want this particular melody to, you know, sequence nicely in the mix and not have audible gapping. But then, of course, that gives us the problem where now we have these peaks on top of the kick that's already been clipped to within an inch of its life. It can't

stand anymore clipping, so we get these peaks summed in here. And now, something's got to clip these off, and that's being done up here at the pre-master bus, where we have a bus clipper right here. And that's this instance of k-clip, which, like every bus clipper, is set up so that it just, you know, there's no extra input or output. It's just got a threshold at zero dB full scale, and so it's doing this much clipping. Watch this value here, right? It's got to do as much as 4.6 dB of clipping, where this kind of interaction is happening on wherever the loudest, you know, little spike over that is. And remember from the last video, sometimes what you see here in the mono view of the signal isn't showing you the true full extent of the peaks, because everything differs between left and right channel. So, somewhere on a left or right channel, we have a peak that's happening somewhere as high as 4.6 over zero. So, that's what's getting clipped off.

Okay, so here's the challenge. We're hearing clipping, right? You can hear it. It's audible. Audible clipping. That pluck no longer sounds as good as it did before because we got this crackle on it. Now, again, this is just a placeholder pluck. This is just like the super earliest, very first stage of writing a new project. I have an idea. I want to capture it. I want to fit that sound to sit up loud enough with my anchor and framework sounds, which in this case is just the kick and the snare for now. Like, they're set high enough and loud enough to hit a certain loudness target that I tend to play in. And I get the sound inside, and I have an idea, and I need to balance it up against the kick and snare. And when I get it loud enough and also ducked to the point where it sounds, you know, not gappy against this kind of longish kick and snare, now I've got clipping because you're hearing the clipping that's being caused.

by k-clip on this particular bus channel where they're all coming together. Let me flip over to the best view so it's a little clearer. So, you know, all my tonal sounds roll up into this bus called tonal, and all my drum sounds roll up into this bus called drums. And so, this is where the plucky sound is coming from on the tonal bus. And then, of course, my drums and kick are coming from here, and they're being summed together at my pre-master right here. Okay, so this is the bus clipper that's doing this shaving, and this is the clipper that's usually the most sensitive in the entire project because this is where finally these drum sounds, which are probably hitting full scale and using up the full range, you know, eventually it's got to be merged with all your other information, and that's where we start running into these problems that need to be clipped. So, this is a super sensitive clipper area for me. And so, if I show you the clippers on this

this bus right. I've got my rack that lets me choose it in k-clip saturated track limit, like I showed you in the last episode 19. But now, let's just talk about k-clip and track limit because this really shows you how it works. It shows you the whole story. In order to do this clipping and to watch the clipping, we're going to just look at the final summed result that's happening on the master. That's the waveform you're looking at here. So, if we zoom in and just see the interaction between the kick and that first part of the pluck here where they overlap, right? This is the overlap that's getting clipped off right at these white lines. Look at the difference and listen to the difference between k-clip and track limit. Now again, track limit is set up to work kind of like a clipper. In this case, I'm using the aggressive style. I usually start with punchy, sometimes I'll flip it to aggressive depending on what you know, whatever I'm

going for and I'll play with the release time to usually between be between 50 and 60 milliseconds usually that's where I start so you know this is where I've got the limiter set up right now and the clipper is just a straight up hard clipper so listen to the difference between k clip and track limit and watch the wave form right here I'm gonna scroll in just a little bit so you can see it more like a kick okay so here's with k clip clipping it off actually let me kind of zoom in to about here okay here's the k-clip clipping it [Music] and let's go ahead and turn on yeah it's all on [Music] right so you can hear that that crackle on top of the pluck and that doesn't sound good right right here now if I switch it over to track limit watch this waveform [Music] where's the crackle do you hear the crackle [Music] now what's different about this waveform

than before. Let's go back to track limit. [Music] Okay, you heard that crackle on top of everything, and there's the crackle. This clipped-off section right here is what's creating that crackle, and of course, that's the aliasing and the distortion. The clipping is too much. We're hearing audible clipping on a bus where the bus clipper is doing its job. And remember the whole trick, the whole reason we have this rack to let us quickly test different ways to control these clips, these peaks, is so we can just listen for the differences. You can clearly hear a difference if I just go back and forth real quick. It's just night and day. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] Okay, the clipper is much... I'm sorry, the limiter is much cleaner sounding. We don't hear that crackle on top of it. So why? Well, that's because limiters carve a release envelope into the signal after they first crushed.

the peaks down right so where this summing is first happening is right about here. We start going over zero, right? You know, not even at this peak here, but this very first peak right here is .01 dB over zero. Okay, so right here at this little spot, the limiter is activated. And as soon as it squashes that peak right to zero, it's saying, I'm going to smash this down, and it's going to stay down like I've pulled everything down. And then I'm going to slowly release back over a span of about 50 milliseconds, which in the scale of things here is about this long, right? So for about this much time, I'm going to take this much time to finally swing back and release that first squash back to no squash at all, right? Now, of course, long before it hits this point, it's running into other peaks that are over zero, right? So effectively, the limiter just stays engaged. And because it clamped down this first time and then clamped down a little more here and then clamped down even more here

now it's, you know, it's taken this much db from this point right here, about 1.56 db, and it's pulled it down to zero. So, that's a one and a half db. So, that's pulled it down, and now it's slowly trying to release, and then it hits this one again, and so it hasn't really risen very much from that one and a half db of clipping. And the span between here and here, right from this peak to this peak, this is a span of only about, uh, eight milliseconds, right? So, with a 50 millisecond release time, that clipper's barely moving from wherever it's squished this one down, and then it sees this next one and squishes it down. And so, it's never really moving from that degree of squash, that's like one and a half, two db. It barely lifts before the next set of peaks or keeps triggering it back down again, so it's very smooth. And so, effectively, it's like just turning the volume down knob down during this section right here.

and then it's only when things are finally staying under zero from this point onward that it slowly releases back up, and it's such a slow release we don't notice it, but it's about a 50-millisecond span. So if we zoom out here, this is why 50 milliseconds tends to work really well. This kind of distance from about here to here is about 50 milliseconds, and this distance is about 60 milliseconds, right? It's not that much difference. And if you think about it, it's roughly for a typical kick drum, it's about three cycles of a typical kick drum tail where kick drums tend to be tuned. It's going to be two to three cycles depending on the pitch of the kick drum, and as long as you're covering about two or three cycles, you'll capture. Sometimes you'll have a thing where you'll have one peak here, and then there might be a dip and another peak over here somewhere, and there's like two or three cycles where one peak is low, but the peaks on either side of it are

higher, and it's just that 50-millisecond gap, which is about this long, right? That 50-millisecond gap just manages to keep the limiter gently riding where the peaks are likely to be happening, and that's why 50 to 60-millisecond time is usually perfect. Sometimes you make it a little longer; you usually don't make it shorter than 50 milliseconds, okay? So, it's basically controlling these peaks effectively by pulling the volume down and keeping it down, so that what's happening is these subsequent bits where we were going over zero right here, these things here and here are literally just, it's just turned down, so the peaks are no longer over zero. It's not actually coming along and shaving the peaks, and that's what the clipper is doing, right? If we go back to the clipper and play this, let me move this over here again [Music]. Okay, the clipper just literally laser beams, laser beams. It doesn't try to pull the volume down; it just shaves the peaks where they

sit and that's why we have this flat flat flat flat flat flat etc. But if we use the limiter [Music], this first one gets controlled, and it's as if it pulled the volume down and just kept it down through here. So, the original shape is mostly maintained, and it's no longer clipped. There's no longer those hard flat clips through here, and that's why you're not hearing the crackle. Because you only get this one moment of non-linear distortion right when it first finds that highest peak, and then it's just keeping the volume down, and these never really go that much above zero. So, there's much, much, much less nonlinear distortion that you're hearing. So, that's why we use a limiter. Now, going back to this example of songwriting, because I'm trying to teach you how to use this method in the context of producing a song, right? So, you bring in a new sound like this, and when you do the clipping on it to bring it up to where it needs to sit in the

framework right to be loud enough for the framework. You go, Oh crap, I'm hearing clippings somewhere in my clipper cascade, and you do something like this to figure out where it's happening, right? Obviously, it's just one sound and a kick drum, and so it's where those two sounds come together that we're hearing the clipping here on the premaster. So, you come look at the pre-mastered, go, Yep, I need to use a limiter on this pre-master if I want to use that sound. But here's what I want to point out. I keep seeing from episode 2 onward every place I've talked about clipping when you need to work in a really loud genre, and you have a legitimate reason to make your mix loud. That's going to constrain your choices, okay? It changes literally the types of sounds you can even bring into the project in the first place. If you need to work in a super loud genre like some of the heavy EDM genres, the bass music genres, even modern pop, there are certain sounds

that simply fall apart when they have to run through all the clippers that are necessary, all the clipping that's necessary to keep everything working together in a very small dynamic range, because that's how you make something loud. It sits in a very small dynamic range, so some sounds just cannot survive the process, and this is a clear example where if you were just using clippers, this particular pluck does not survive the clipping. By the time we get up here to the premaster bus, it just sounds like crap. [Music] Right, you hear that crackle on every pluck, every hit of that sound. So this is where you have a choice as a producer. Your choices are, well, one, you could try using a limiter instead of a clipper if it's on a bus or even on an original track, right? If you're trying to get the sound loud enough and the clippers just too dirty, too ugly, try the limiter instead. And the cool thing about track limit, this is not a full-blown mastering limiter, this is an ultra-lightweight

scaled-down version of dmg audio's flagship limiter they call limitless. This is meant to be incredibly lightweight. It's wideband. It still uses the same two-stage architecture where there's actually two limiters wired in series, and the first limiter is set with a true longish attack time that lets all the transient peaks go right through to the second limiter. The first limiter only worries about controlling the sustain portion of the signal, and then the second limiter is only seen and operating on the transients that the first limiter let through. And so, it's only clamping down on the transients, and the combined effect is kind of what you're seeing in this waveform here. It's really clean, and I honestly don't know whether other limiters like pro-l or elevate or any of the other limiters out there. I don't know if they truly use a two-stage approach under the hood like that. I kind of suspect they don't, and I've never, you know, everyone

limiters are like black magic processes, and the developers rarely talk about what they're actually doing under the hood. Um, but my guess from listening to them and looking at what they do is that track limit and limitless are both really amazingly clean limiters in a certain way. And this especially is so lightweight. You can put tons of these all over your project, and they're almost as lightweight as just a hard clipper. They really take very, very little system resources. They don't incur any latency. And so, I literally think of track limit as just another type of clipper. And I usually set it up punchy with the release between 50 and 60 milliseconds by default. And I almost never change the release to be longer or shorter than that. Sometimes I'll try a different algorithm to see if I like the sound of that algorithm better. And I leave the stereo linking at 70, and I leave all these things just right here at zero. I just clip at zero with the limiter. Okay, so you can hear that it sounds better and

that's one way to solve this promise. It's like, All right, I really want to use this pluck. I can make it work if I use, uh, at wherever bus I'm hearing the clipping or wherever, whatever point I first start hearing that clipping happening. If I use track limit, everything sounds better. So, the answer then is, Okay, set yourself to use track limit even if it's super early in the project because track limit's very lightweight. And then come over here and disable k-clip, right? So that the only thing that's actually using system resources on this particular bus is track limit. And right now, k-clip and newfangled saturated are sitting there, but they're deactivated in Bitwig, which means they literally don't exist. They're using no memory, no CPU, no nothing. They're just kind of waiting to be reactivated in this mode. So, this is one way to carry on right now. Let me reactivate k-clip and show you another choice you could make, right? You could say, Well, I really want to use

this plug and I really want to use this kick, but obviously, I cannot make my track as loud as I originally hoped for. That's your other choices, just don't try to make your track as loud. So let's watch what happens if we use the VCA trick. I'm just going to pull this VCA knob open, right, and we're just gonna take everything down, everything by... okay, I know I'll just tell you rather than show you. I'm clipping this original kick by about two and a half dB. The kick itself is already clipped, and it's clipped within an inch of its life. And if I play it by itself and um take this down about three dB, well, let's just play it by itself for a second. Okay, that's the original kick clipped about two and a half dB. If I pull the VCA down by three dB like this, you're going to see this kick change a lot, right? Looks quite a bit different, and now nothing is actually even touching the zero line, and it sounds a little rounder.

um, and so then when we let the pluck sum with this, which we're already relaxing the clipping on the kick right here in these first waveforms, right? Look out one more time, see how even these very first parts of the pitch drop in the tail are squared off. But if we take this down 3 dB, they're no longer squared off, right? Even if I take it down just 2 dB, those are sitting effectively below zero now, right? But really, this is where there's absolutely no clipping happening. It's 3 dB down, okay? So now, if we let that same pluck, which is itself now 3 dB quieter, because remember we put this VCA everywhere, that's part of the VCA track now. When we look at the summing, even with K Clip doing the actual clipping, right? We're going to do this with K Clip now and watch the waveform. And now you don't see any of those flat shave sections anymore because everything is just working out so that, you know, even the summed amount

of the kick and the pluck on top of it. Even the raw sum isn't really going over zero, except maybe one little teeny spot right here, which is the tiniest, shortest little clip in the world. Look at the difference. Here's no VCA. We're back to where we were. [Music] Right? Look at that. And now if we just take everything down 3 dB. [Music] Right? So much better. There's hardly anything left to be clipped, and so you don't hear the clipping as much, right? It doesn't sound like bad anymore. Listen. [Music] You don't hear that same amount of clipping. If we go back to zero, the clipping comes back. [Music] And that's just terrible. So you have two choices here so far. You could try to use something other than a clipper, try a limiter if you want to keep striving for your same target loudness, or you could just say to heck with it. I don't need to be super loud with this song. This song is going to, you know

probably end up being more mellow than I originally thought. And of course, this decision is always evolving as you keep adding more sounds and your arrangement keeps building up, and the song takes shape. You may decide, Yeah, this is a chill song. It doesn't need to be that loud, or whatever. That's one approach: just take everything down so that everything plays nicely. Okay, now there is a third option, and that option is to choose a different sound, throw out that original sound because it doesn't play nice at the original loudness. So we're going to leave the gain up here at full gain again, but now what I'm going to do is just swap out a different sound for this plug. So I have a, you know, this is the original pluck we're listening to, but I'm going to mute it and replace it with a slightly different plug that's just as loud, but it's a different sound design. And look at what happens now. [Music] Now the peaks are going just as high over zero as with the first pluck.

but for whatever reason, this pluck survives the clipping much, much better than the hard clipping, and you don't hear anything horrible happening with the clipping. [Music] Okay, I mean, any clipping that's there is incredibly light, especially compared to the previous sound. Okay, and so here, the difference between k-clip and track limit isn't much of a difference at all. Listen. [Music] Do [Music] not much of a difference at all. You still might choose to use track limit for whatever reason. It certainly doesn't hurt, and in fact, in most practical situations, I do tend to use track limit on my premaster because, in general, by the time your mix fully builds up, a limiter can sound much better on a very complex signal that's full of sub and kick and other, you know, high mid-range sounds, brighter sounds. The more complex your signal, as I said in episode 19, the more complex your signal and the more that signal tends to include bass and sub frequencies, generally, the better sounding a limiter will be than if you use a straight-up hard.

clipper. Although it's perfectly fine early in a project to just keep using the hard clipper, even if you're hearing a little dirt, right? You can live with it when you're just trying to get ideas down real quick. Worry about the fine details later, or it doesn't really hurt necessarily on your premaster if you start hearing clipping right away like I did with that original pluck sound. We'll just come over here and see if track limit makes it sound better, and if it does, pick track limit, deactivate K-clip, and keep working, right? It's a quick choice, it's an easy choice. If you set up a rack like this, and it's probably only at one bus, you'll have to even make that decision super early as you're starting out writing a new project. Okay, so I hope this has been informative and helpful, and I will see you in the next video. [Music] You

Mixing Loud with CTZ - Ep. 20 - Limiters vs Clippers

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