Smart Clipping Just Changed the Game...

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]I used to use a clipper before my limiter, now I don't. This is why.

[00:00:04]Smart clipping just became a thing and I'm so stoked. I'm sure a lot of you have seen the new plugin UniL by Tone Projects. I've been talking about it on this channel and a lot of people think that it's just this fancy new limiter.

[00:00:17]It is that, but it is also a smart clipper. I'm going to show you exactly how I use the clipping workflow inside a mastering context using UniL.

[00:00:29]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Okay, let's quickly dissect what I've done there. So, I start off by choosing the full preset and I dragged it all the way over to the loud setting.

[00:01:31]And what that did is a couple things that I just like for music like this. So, what it did is it activated the multi-band low split.

[00:01:39]So, it is treating the lows as a separate band, which I find in many cases can let the lows breathe a little bit better. And then what it did after that is it activated the clip attack.

[00:01:51]That's the first parameter that I typically play with in the clipping workflow. Clip attack will send it adds a bit of uh an attack to the fast limiting stage. And what that allows is the first millisecond or so of transients that are detected to bypass the fast stage and go straight to a hard clipper. That's useful because that very leading edge of the transient is often times it's a little micro transient.

[00:02:15]You're not going to miss it. And when you clip that off without clipping the rest of it, you can get away with pushing a decent amount into the clipper without feeling like it's distorting or blurring the transient of the drum. So, clip attack's great. I scaled the clip attack using the outer ring outside of the balance knob, okay? That allows me to scale that up a bit.

[00:02:36]Then I used the clip above and I was pressing the shift key so you can solo the operating band. It's not the operating band is in multiband, but you're soloing what it's detecting in terms of how it's filtering the side chain. What that is going to do is again tell Uni L to send things that contain higher frequency content straight to the hard clipper. Why is that useful? Why is that smart clipping? Well, because when you have a sound that's a burst of high frequency content like a transient of a drum is drum transients are first of all very loud. They're the loudest things in your mix. And second of all, they contain all frequencies. So, you can clip the heck out of them more so than anything else because the transient already has density and frequency that has a psychoacoustic masking effect. It hides the distortion from the clipper. You can't make noise more noisy, right? You can maybe shift the tonal balance a little bit brighter with a hard clipper, but really you can take signal that is already noise like signal and you can really clip it. So, this particular feature clip above is really handy. And because this track has a vocal in it, you were hearing me also try to exclude a lot of the vocal from that from the clipping, right? Now that you know what's going on, let's play with those again. At the end of the day, the [music] day >> [music] [music] >> Okay, now let's talk about the transient detection. Uni L already does a really good job of setting up how to grab the transients, but if you want to tweak it, uh and in this case I do, you can. So, why do I want to tweak it in this case?

[00:04:39]Well, this track has a rap vocal in it that's really staccato. It's very percussive.

[00:04:47]And as an engineer, I may want to make the subjective aesthetic choice to push a little bit of aggressiveness on the vocal by choosing to classify the staccato fronts of the vocal as a transient, have Uni L pick that up. In a normal limiter that might have transient detection, you can't tell it to do that unless you have control of the algorithm. And most of these um automatic transient detection things are a black box. You can't control what it's picking up. So, in this case in Uni L I want to show you you do. You can reach in and you can dial everything in. So, the most important button for this is the transient monitor focus. It lets you hear what it's picking up. Now, I was initially kind of confused when I first listened to this cuz I was like, I can hear the rest of the music in there. And what it's actually doing is it's not giving you solo only on the transients.

[00:05:38]It's actually padding down the rest of the music bed by 20 dB, so you can hear it in context. So, you can hear the transients really popping out, and you can also see that there's a indicator light that will flash every time there's a transient, but you hear it in context of greatly attenuated music, which is pretty neat.

[00:05:56]>> [music] [music] >> Okay, so that's the transient monitor focus. You can adjust the threshold.

[00:06:08]Yes. Um so, if the threshold's all the way up, you're not going to be picking up any transients at all. If it's all the way down, you're reaching deep into the signal. This is another massively useful feature. So, if you're using a a plugin, like any compressor or any limiter, it has a static threshold, right? So, if it's going to try and pick up a an attack, that attack needs to be loud enough, high enough in amplitude, peak level, that it goes over the threshold.

[00:06:35]Well, Uni L doesn't work like that. Uni L can pick up very quiet drums. So, imagine you have a a very detailed high dynamic range jazz performance or something, and there's like maybe a big brush hit on the snare, but there are these little flutters, little little tiny um hats, and little flams on the snare.

[00:06:56]Well, if you have a a limiter or a compressor or a clipper with this static threshold, it's not going to pick up that stuff. And it certainly wouldn't classify it as a transient. Well, Uni L can. You can go uh set the detection threshold very low, and even if the amplitude of a transient is nowhere near like a limiting ceiling, it can still classify it as a transient and process it in a way that it gets punchy through the clipper and through the fast limiter. Magic trick. It's just absolutely brilliant. You can have kind of like a soft knee or hard knee approach with it. Let's look at how we can refine the transient detection. When you hover over the uh filter, for example, you can see the actual frequency response of the filters in the main FFT display, and then if you have your graph over here set to auto, what it does is it moves from a FFT that is has a window that's optimized for resolution, and it moves to a window that is optimized for peak level, so you can really see the transient. So, when you hover over here, the graph changes.

[00:08:07]And that's just so useful for dialing in the transient. So, just watch this. I'm just going to hover over it so you can see the change in the FFT.

[00:08:15]>> [music] [music] [music] >> Okay. Now, if you want to tweak what's happening in the filter, I would recommend enabling the solo passband.

[00:08:34]So, this is going to listen to what the filter process is grabbing, and this is very useful if I want to exclude the vocal or include the vocal. So, again, my reasoning here, I might want to include the vocal in the transient detection if I want to smash it a little bit, if I want to make it a bit more aggressive, like with the clipping or the fast limiting stage. You know, you choose that up here.

[00:08:54]What's happening with the detected transients? You choose fast limit, clip, or both.

[00:08:59]Now, I may want to exclude the vocal from this if I don't want it, if it's aggressive enough, and I don't want to distort it or step on it with the clipper and fast limiter, then I might choose to exclude it. So, let's just take a look at some of the really amazing filtering options in here. I'll leave the solo band active so you can really hear what it's grabbing.

[00:09:21]>> [music] [music] [music] >> Yeah, so if I want to exclude the vocal, this is a great way to do it. If I want to just try and grab the clap or the hats, the double band pass, um, neat way to, uh, to do that.

[00:09:50]>> [music] [music] [singing] [music] [singing] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Okay, great. So, now that we figured out what the transient detection engine is grabbing, then we can choose what to do with it over here. So, under the transients area, we can choose to push some of that detected transient to the fast limiter, and we can choose to push some of it to the clipper. Um, we can interplay between them by inverse linking them with holding the shift key. So, let's just listen to what that sounds like.

[00:10:58]>> [music] [music] >> Nice. I want to mention the boost control here. So, the boost control is going to provide, uh, accentuation on the transients. And if you have it set low, then it's only going to be actively boosting when, uh, the transients are being limited. But, when you start to set it higher and higher, it begins to boost transients that are not being affected by limiting or clipping. Very interesting. This is a a pretty extreme setting. Um usually kind of recommended to top out at about 50%. If you have it over 50%, you have to watch for and listen for things maybe getting a little bit jumpy cuz it can start to um fairly aggressively boost transients. So uh be careful with that one. Watch that one if you go north of uh north of 50 on that. Okay? So let's uh let's optimize our balance here of what's happening with the fast limiter and with the clipper.

[00:12:06]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Yeah, I find when you have a higher boost value, you want to be a bit more conservative with these values here. So when I start to push the clipper up the vocal, I'm really listening to what's happening to the vocal there. Uh the vocal does start to sound uh a little bit uh bright when I push the clipper up and it can sound a bit too meaty and gritty when I push the fast limiter up.

[00:13:05]So having these at a bit more conservative values is nice. Okay? The other thing you can do is press the soften button. That can be useful if you've got really sharp transients. Uh let's try that out.

[00:13:16]>> [music] [music] >> Turn it up and at the end of the Nice. Now, I want to point out that uh the Clipper has over sampling as you would expect. It's up here. By default, it is set to 4x. Um couple things that I want to make sure you guys get about this. A newbie mistake with a Clipper or over sampling of any kind is to have a rate that you set when you dial in your your master. And then to say, "Oh, I'm just going to set it to render it at a higher quality." When you increase the level of over sampling, you change what that process is seeing, right?

[00:14:02]And that changes the sound of the processing in sometimes not so subtle ways. So, I will set the Clipper over sampling um at whatever rate it's going to be at in the final version.

[00:14:16]Now, you'll notice that there's a 1x.

[00:14:18]Why would we have that? Even isn't over sampling always good? Uh no, actually.

[00:14:22]Mastering engineer Bob Mack, the guy right here, who's the legend uh who came up with uh the initial workflow behind this plugin, he asked for the 1x version. And uh why would you do that? Aliasing's bad, isn't it? Shouldn't we always avoid aliasing?

[00:14:37]Uh no, aliasing is a is a sound. And so, the 1x version can be crunchy in a good way. When you're uh clipping just transients, there's so much density to them and so much high frequency content that aliasing that folds back just kind of adds a bit of high frequency smack to them, which can sound good in some cases, and it also adds density to the transients, which can also sound good. So, 1x is you know, over sampling is not always good. It's an aesthetic to play with. Yeah, I'm going to put it back to 4x.

[00:15:09]And uh the other thing I want to say is that the the way that the over sampling works in this Clipper is neat. I have no idea how it's happening.

[00:15:19]I should ask Runa about this, but apparently, it is only activating over sampling when it's actively clipping something. And when it's not actively clipping something, the over sampling and then that entire process, all the stuff that goes on, up sampling, down sampling, decimation, low pass filtering is not active.

[00:15:38]Don't know how that works, but that's neat. This is how I work with clipping inside of Uni L, and I want to impress a couple of things on you. Um and then we're going to do a maybe a final AB so you can hear the kind of more aggressive clipped version with something that's maybe a bit more safe. So, the there's big differences between this and normal clipping workflow. If you were to try and do anything like this, you would have to be hand automating a clipper, which is what Bob used to do, Bob Max used to do. Uh and still you wouldn't get anything close to this.

[00:16:13]You'd have to draw in hand automation on every single transient so that you could be clipping in the time domain. This is time-based clipping as well as amplitude-based clipping.

[00:16:24]And it has advanced transient detection.

[00:16:27]So, it's just so much beyond what how a normal clipper lets me work and what it lets me process that um this is my new workflow. And uh I'm really I'm really in love with it. And it's basically gotten me to I'm not saying I'm never going to clip before my limiter again. I might do that it for an aesthetic, but I'm not reaching for a clipper before my limiter like I used to do in almost every case. Let's go ahead and use the B state and let's uh let's go and throw something maybe a bit more balanced on there and let's um AB back and forth between the uh the balanced sound and the clipped sound, okay? So, you can hear the the difference in the aggressiveness that the clipper is adding in the aesthetic of the mix. At the end of the day, [music] the day got a end.

[00:17:12]We working no win. Take the earnings and you Rubber band it won't bend. Ten it, grab ten it and tens it [music] cost, but I'm feeling no so so I'm going Turn it up and At the end of the day, the day got to end. We working [music] to win. Take the earn as you spend. Rubber band it won't bend. Ten it, grab ten it and tens it cost, but I'm feeling [music] no so so I'm going Turn it up and Now I'm I'm intentionally really smashing it here so that we can hear everything working. And um yeah, in case you didn't notice this before, the gain reduction split meter here that's showing you the work being done by each one of the stages is also just brilliant. Okay, so let's take a look uh at this and I want you to pay attention to what's being done as I flip back and forth between the kind of safer preset and my aggressive smack you in the face preset.

[00:18:03]At [music] the end of the day, the day got to end.

[00:18:07]We working to win. Take [music] the earn as you spend. Rubber band it won't bend.

[00:18:11]Ten it, grab ten it and tens it cost, but I'm feeling no so so I'm going Turn it up and At the end of the day, the day got to end.

[00:18:20]Yeah, you can see that the slow stage which is blue is doing almost nothing in my version. You can see I have the release set at 10 milliseconds so it's really it's really doing almost nothing.

[00:18:30]And uh yeah, yeah, great. Um there's a couple little things that I I also want to point out. Um so much thought has gone into this plugin. They worked on this for 2 and 1/2 years and and worked with tons of mastering engineers. Um I love this. I want to go render, I want a margin. Typically I go negative.2 dB.

[00:18:48]Boom, you've got these choices baked in.

[00:18:52]Normally I have to type these in manually. Um I just love that. Boom, you can tell. I don't know if that was Bob Max's suggestion or if Rune just did that, but just absolutely amazing. And then also the meters, you can see when you hover over you you get these little extra context things that don't show by default so they don't clutter up the interface, but like here, if you want to increase the resolution on the meter, you can do that, too. At the >> [music] [music] >> Okay, final note here is that it is you know, with with with great control comes comes great responsibility. It is entirely possible to make things too smackie because of the transient detection and how much you can tailor and contour the processing, it is easy to get a little carried away.

[00:19:45]And what sounds maybe good to you cuz it's really aggressive and kind of bright in the moment might not sound good to you later. So, that's where it's good to be able to do AB back and forth and maybe dial back some of the aggressiveness. I've really smacked it over the head on this one. This is kind of like you know, you got these three stages. It's kind of like three people all smacking you in the face at the same time.

[00:20:10]But like you know, in a good way. Like three of your friends high-fiving your face, you know, but do it do it lightly. It's not always good to get obliterated. So, watch out for too much of a good thing.

[00:20:24]Watch out for being a little bit too heavy-handed. I know I'm having to rein myself in a little bit, but it's so nice to be able to work with the transients this way and in particular the clipper integration is just you know, I didn't I didn't even know I needed this.

[00:20:38]>> [laughter] >> And now that I have it, I can't can't believe I ever lived it. Smart clipping.

[00:20:43]So, there you go. This is the next evolution in how loudness gets created in music and this is the bleeding edge of technology.

[00:20:53]Big ups to Bob Mack for sharing this workflow and asking Rune to build this plugin. Huge thanks to Rune for [music] the commitment that it took. Tone Projects, I've noticed with all their plugins, they're they're just so well well-thought-out, and [music] a real pleasure to use. It It's fun. It's fun to use. It's a plugin that invites you in, and I love [music] that.

[00:21:17]Beautiful. Uh as a final note, I work directly with artists and producers on mixing and mastering, [music] studio and acoustics design, as well as audio brands that want to showcase new technology. If you're interested in working with me, the link [music] to that is below, as is the link to Unit L.

[00:21:35]Nice. Go and smash some music.

[00:21:36]>> [music] >> Clip to your heart's content, um and then think twice before you publish it. You want to rein it back in a little bit because it [music] is so fun to get carried away. All right, guys. Thanks so much. Happy music making, and I will see you on the next one.

[00:21:50]>> [music] >> Peace.

[00:21:57]>> [music] [music]