This is going to be sort of rambling because I have a lot of thoughts and questions now after reading and testing some things, sorry.
I've been wondering about how to get super distorted crunchy kicks that are used in a lot of Lil Pump and similar rappers beats. Tutorials always say to intentionally clip your master track just a tiny bit but in my experience that has always caused crackling or pops in the exported file on playback. Besides, I don't even think it's possible if you're using a limiter although I could be wrong. Please noteb I am not condoning that type of music, I just like the grittiness of the kicks lol.
Most of the time when I mix I try to keep the highest peaks (basically the kick) contained in the -6 to -5 db range, but can never get that gritty sound in a good way, even with saturation, heavy compression etc, it just sounds like the original, only a little more thumpy or like complete garbage... Also, I've NEVER ran anything into the red on the master or even individual mixer tracks because I've read and been conditioned to believe that it was "bad".
I decided I'd do some tests about clipping intentionally, because within FL it doesn't really sound bad at all, and I'm assuming that has to do with 32bit floating point numbers or whatever it's called. I don't really know the difference between "db" and "dbfs" but I know it's impossible to go above 0 dbfs in the digital realm, and floating point numbers allow you to go way beyond that or something while working in a DAW. So I loaded a basic ass kick, turned the volume knob all the way up, turned the mixer track it was on all the way up (it was definitely hitting past the 3db mark on both the individual track and master track) then exported it and dropped it into a new completely clean project. Obviously it was super crunchy and dostorted, sort of like the kicks I was looking for, but I was super surprised about the level on the new kick. It sat right at -6 db, extremely close to the original kick. I assumed it would be right at 0 db where the 0 dbfs digital limit(?) on export would have cut it off. There were no limiters anywhere in the project...
This leads me to my next question, is clipping in the individual mixer tracks the same as clipping the master, at least before export? And if so, can I just push the shit out of kicks and 808s then use a bus to bring them back down to get crazy amounts of distortion that isn't actually clipping anywhere? Clipping on the master for exported tracks always had weird crackling and pops on the kicks when played in my car (which is one of the reasons I adopted the "never go into red ever" mindsets) so I feel like that could be super useful for putting beats out that don't necessarily need to be super clean. Is this basically the same thing as clipping into a brickwall limiter or is it different?
TL;DR this barely suns up what I typed above, but is clipping individual mixer tracks then using a bus or send to bring them down to reasonable mixing levels an ok way to get heavily distorted sounds? And is that process actually any different from using something like a Clipping tool or limiter with extreme settings?
Submitted September 02, 2017 at 02:11AM by ThatZBear https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/6xjxy6/ran_a_few_tests_with_clipping_and_read_some/?utm_source=ifttt
Javier Rodriguez
Friday, September 1, 2017