Are There Recordings With Clipping?

Snowman999

Active member
I keep my Master Fader at 0.

None of the tracks are recorded hot. They're all recorded well (as well as I can do). None hit the red on 0. I never have to push them up for them to be heard. I can blend fairly well.

Maybe 2 or 3 times in a song, usually on a vocal word, the meter will nudge into the red. You don't hear distortion or anything awful. But, it does touch the red. Not for any length of time. If I had to guess timing it's less than a 1/16 note and has never gone over +1 in the red.

Is this normal clipping? I will, if necessary mess with this till the red is gone, if necessary. But, do "real" records contain this type of clipping?

I think I'm getting mixing craze.
 
I am guessing that you ARE recording too hot. Common error in digital recording when starting out. Record with tracks peaking no higher than around -12dBFS.
 
Since digits came along, chasing maximum is pointless.

I do however, think that the tales of doom and gloom don't seem to be consistent when you accidentally go into the red. However, if you run your recordings through things like Sound Forge or other editors it will search for over level distortion and tell you it found it. If it finds it, then you crashed a few samples and there IS distortion. I suspect that crashing a few samples of 48,000 isn't significant. Is a hundred acceptable? Two hundred? See the problem? There's simply no need to crash any, if we're chasing purity. Sometimes digital kit just sounds hard when working near the top, other times it's nasty. Both are wrong and both easily preventable.
 
There are commercial releases that clip pretty hard in the mix, but I don't think it helps them sound better, just louder, and you can get louder with a good limiter.

During tracking and mixing it's generally preferable to stay well away from 0dBFS. When you start adding a bunch of tracks together the peak level will rise a bit. Just start them with a little more headroom, either at tracking or at the start of the mix.
 
Thanks everyone.

I've fixed that problem. It's a ME thing.

I did have a strange one. It wasn't necessary so I deleted it. At the end of the song there's 3 crashes on a cymbal. I kept lowering it and it still hit the red. I was -28 solo, you couldn't hear it unless the speakers were cranked to ten. Yet it was still sending the master to red. There was no effects on it. It was strange, but useless. I have a tendency to experiment at the end of songs.
 
Ultimately it comes down to whether or not that nudge into the red/0 sounds awful. If it does, then you have to fix it or re~do it or wipe it. But if it doesn't, what's the problem ? I used to think that any kind of encroachment over 0 was the devil but I soon realized that it wasn't the case, or at least it wasn't on my DAW. Now, that's not a blanket endorsement of recording hot. I avoid it like the plague but once in a while there may be an overenthusiastic hit on a conga or drum or cymbal or a voice that's gone a little over. I know when whatever it may be sounds awful and if it does, it gets redone right away.
And if the mix is clipping, I just turn it down although to be honest, that never happens anymore. It used to when I was fairly new to mixing {and recording for that matter}.
 
I'd say there are four kinds of undesirable effects from clipping.

1. Analog clipping adds all kinds of harmonic distortion. That might sound great on a tube amp with a guitar, but for most sources through solid state electronics it's not really too pleasant.

2. Digital clipping kills the dynamics. It lops off the peaks. I was once given some QOTSA as a reference for a mastering project and I found that it was just flat-topped all over the place. They got it loud but the snare sounded dead.

3. Some DACs, probably older ones from the CD era of digital, seem to be calibrated in a way that doesn't accommodate inter-sample peaking. I think it's because the original designers of the Red Book specification didn't foresee the future of DSP. If you simply digitize an analog signal and don't clip it on the way in, you'll never have a situation that causes inter-sample peaks. The absolute maximum voltage output of the DAC would occur at 0dBFS. There was no anticipated need to provide for higher voltage so the analog circuitry simply wasn't given that capacity. If you put a 0dBFS peak clipped signal through one of those it gets crunchy.

4. I think some early recording ADCs simply produced noise if the input went above 0dBFS.

Case 1 is generally audible. Case 2 is more subtle. In both cases, if you think it sounds okay, that's your call. I prefer to avoid them most of the time. Case 3 is uncommon, but it's worth considering that your mix might get crunchy on some converters even if you don't hear it on yours. Using metering that shows the levels of a reconstructed signal (true peak) can help avoid this. I suspect case 4 is extremely uncommon these days.
 
I use Pro Tools 6 on the earliest Mac G5. So, to say my system is antique (for these times) is an understatement.

I've found now that automating the aux inputs that have the reverb don't always work at all. One word was hitting red. So, I lowered it in the aux and I had it down to 0 and the word's volume remained the same. So, I delete that Aux and create a new one and it works fine. BUT, I'll lower the volume on the word from say 0 to -3 and it plays fine. Then I'll move on and when I go to listen later on, it's touching red again. When I do my adjustments I make sure to start the song far enough back that all the sound will be there when it reaches that point.

I think my system might be just too old for absolutes.

All the touching red that I've mentioned, and that made me write this thread, does not affect the sound of the recording at all. I've just been told that you should never touch red. So, I'm doing my best to fix that. For the most part, it's actually working.
 
My teenage years were in the middle of the "teeny-bopper" era, and I heard a wide variety of audio quality in the commercial hits of that time. Then as that era morphed into the "underground music" characterized with lots of fuzz, there was definitely some clipping in those recordings. We must remember, of course, that most of the recordings of that era were on analog equipment, which could tolerate more clipping before the sound quality became objectionable. By contrast, the age of digital mixing and recording is far less forgiving for clipping, at least on the master recording itself, though that recording might contain tracks which have clipping on them. Fuzz by its nature involves clipping, distortion, nonlinearity, or whatever name you want to give it. I just finished recording a song here in my home-recording studio; since I was trying to depict a level of anger rampant these days, I deliberately set the mike gain just high enough to give my voice a slight degree of clipping in a few places during the song. Since my voice has a definite "twang" to it, a slight amount of clipping was exactly what I wanted on the vocal track. Of course, I also used fuzz on one of my guitar tracks to enhance the effect.
One critical point which is important to me in my recording studio is that each project is about making music with the tools which I have available. Since music is art, I believe the overall focus should be on conveying something of the meaning or impression the artist is out to communicate. The work at hand might be something which needs clean sound on all of the tracks and ultimately on the master recording; on the other hand, a bit of clipping or other distortion might be in order on at least some of the tracks. Obviously, if one were to crank up the levels high enough to "ride far over the red line" and produce severe clipping, the final result might be so bad that "heck wouldn't have it."
 
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