How To Clip My Drums? Here Is How & Audio Teasers (Before/After)

If you’re confused by the concept of clipping, we can help you. This article will explain the difference between Soft and Hard Clipping and how you should use it on drums and mix in general.

If you’re new to the world of music production, you’ve heard of the word clipping. Sometimes it’s used in the context of recording as something to avoid. On the other hand, it is mentioned in mixing and mastering as something that can give extra energy to your sound or save the clarity and final volume of your mixes. Because of these different cases, you can get a little confused. But don’t worry, in this article, we’ll lay it all out for you to understand.

How Should I Clip My Drums?

If you feel your drums need an extra punch, clipping would be the perfect solution for that. And you can apply this to any percussion instrument – kick drum, snare, 808, or EDM bit. Below we will try to give you instructions on what to do.

• Choose What You Want To Clip
  Choose which instrument you want to process, whether it’s a kick drum, a snare, or the whole drum bus. Or maybe you want to add clipping to the electronic beat? There’s no canon here. You can use it on anything.
• Pick The Desired Plugin
  You can use any clipping plugin you have access to. Almost all of them have the same settings and working principles. In this case, we’ll take StandardCLIP from SIR Audio Tools as an example.
• Set The Clipping Threshold
  Start lowering the threshold for the clipping to come into play. You will get rid of unnecessary peaks in which there is no vital audio information. Listen and find the golden mean when you are not limiting too much. The necessary indicators will immediately show you where you are.
  
  Set the desired clipping threshold
• Select The Oversampling
  Almost all clipping plugins have an oversampling setting. The higher you set this parameter, the better the results will be. That is, you will be able to avoid artifacts if any. But keep in mind that high oversampling will affect your CPU.
  
  Determine what level of oversampling is appropriate for your sound and the system as a whole

Here are some examples of clipping on drums. The difference is subtle, but you can hear the snare and kick getting a little tighter.

Unclipped Drums:

Clipped Drums:

In the end, you’ll find that clipping makes your drums, percussion, or beats more pronounced in the mix. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to clip them all the time. Think of it as an instrument that can help you sound more expressive. However, it will still be helpful in many modern genres, be it EDM, DnB, Trap, Rock, or Metal…

Is Soft-Clipping Good For Drums?

In theory, you can use soft clipping for almost any instrument that needs extra expression. But it is most often used for drums, percussion, or masters in general. The first thing you need to do is get a clipper in a plugin. Some DAWs have such software built-in. 

Why Should I Clip My Drums?

Clipping your drums is useful when you want to keep the character of your drums to be the same. So even when the signal starts to peak and distort, your drums will keep their energy and punch. Clipping is also useful to keep your drums sounding more consistent and increase the loudness.

When is clipping a bad thing?

If the limiting gave some pleasant harmonics to the signal in the analog realm, the situation is somewhat different in the digital. It is especially noticeable with recording. If your signal is too hot, the system can’t handle it, and you’ll notice a pronounced digital hard clipping, which is not pleasing to the ear because it will sound hoarse.

An example of a clipped signal – You can observe heavily clipped audio files in mastered tunes that are loud.

Therefore, it is necessary to monitor gain staging when recording digitally. You have to find the golden mean so that your signal is not too hot and has some headroom for further processing. But at the same time, it is worth remembering that it should not be too quiet because you can get a pretty high noise threshold.

To summarize, clipping in digital recording can be a pretty bad thing because it can make your audio defective. Of course, some repairing plugins can save you. Still, it’s always a good idea to make sure you’re correctly gaining staging unless you intentionally create a digital clipping effect for creative purposes.

Why is clipping used in music production?

The harmonics were commonplace in analog times. That’s because these effects were provided by hardware gear by physically limiting it to tube, transistor, or tape equipment. Engineers drove gain on units and got a more expressive sound with a kind of imperfection that was still pleasing to the ear.

After music production shifted to digital in the early 2000s, many realized that the sound in this realm was relatively clean and lacked extra energy. Therefore, engineers and producers began to look for ways to add this imperfection and coloration. So they started to use different plugins that could give effects like saturation, distortion, overdrive, etc.

Another important fact is that clipping can be pretty effective on drums or percussion. The fact is that often in these instruments, you can see peaks in which there is no such crucial tonal information. So you can use clippers to cut off these peaks and free up space for limiting, giving the ability to achieve clarity and extra volume.

What does soft clipping mean?

Imagine that the signal amplitude increases and reaches a certain threshold, but the waveform edges will not be cut off but rounded. In simple words, as it is amplified, the sound will be more expressive. We will even get harmonics, but not as evident as hard clipping. It is what will be called soft clipping.

Soft clipping allows us to ensure that we do not get any negative artifacts. Imagine you are using soft clipping on a kick drum. So you will increase the amplitude of the waveform, you will give the impression that the hit is even stronger, but despite this, the sound will remain transparent.