Avoid Clipping Your Mixes in REAPER

[Music] hi i'm kenny joya welcome to another one of my tutorials in this video i'm going to show you how to avoid clipping your mixes in reaper so what is clipping or digital overs or distortion it's when you make your mix or each track in your mix so loud that it distorts or overloads the mixing bus for example i have a waveform right here and it looks fine but if we make it too loud like this we could see up here it turns the waveforms into square waves which is going to sound terrible and very distorted so i'm going to show you how to avoid this with your mixes i have a project right here with some drums piano bass and synths let's hear it now [Music] now it seems to sound fine we don't really hear any audible distortion but there still might be i should also mention if we go to the master track go to view master track i have effects on the master bus i'm using an eq and a compressor but i'm not using a limiter so it's not limiting the output of this mix so let's check for digital overs or clipping and the way to do that is to go to file and choose render which opens up the render dialog here's where we render any final mixes we need so let's set it up to master mix entire project and go down here and do a dry run which is a test or a preview of our mix and it runs it and we can see with these red lines that it is clipping and we can see over here our mix is 2.6 db too loud and 245 samples that are clipping so even though we don't hear it there's still digital overs or distortion in our final mix and that's not good and we should also take note of this number right here the luff's value this is going to tell us the perceived loudness of our mix let's remember this number so to fix our clipping by 2.6 db is we could adjust the master fader just right click it notice it's set at zero you can readjust it here we'll just type in the value let's type in negative 2.7 so it should no longer clip because it was clipping by 2.6 let's close this let's render it again or just preview it right here and now we can see there's no overs or clipping our peak is at minus 0.1 with no samples clipping but notice the wuff's value changed it's minus 17.8 so it's going to be quieter than the previous mix let's compare it sounds like this now [Music] and before it sounded like this [Music] so it was a bit louder which may not matter depending on your purposes or your use if you're sending it to a mastering engineer the volume or perceived volume shouldn't matter they'll take care of that you just don't want your mix to clip because they can't undo that so if you just want to avoid clipping this is our solution but if you still want your mix to the same perceived loudness from before we should do this instead leave the master track at 0 like before and add a limiter to the end of our master track let's go to the track effects on the master track let's add a limiter to the end of our chain type in limit in the filter and we can choose any of these limiters to do this job but my personal preference is this one the event horizon limiter let's choose it and now with this plugin we could limit the output of our mix and if we leave the threshold at zero and keep the ceiling right here it should avoid any clipping without making our mix sound lower let's preview the render again right down here and notice there was still no clipping our peak is still under zero and those samples are over zero or clipping but notice the luff's value is the same so we kept the same volume or perceived volume as the original mix but we avoided clipping let's hear the difference before [Music] and after [Music] it pretty much sounds the same if we want to make our mix even louder we can adjust the threshold over here if we set it here and preview the render again notice we still have no clipping but the wuff's value is now louder so the perceived volume is going to be a bit higher but we are adding some artifacts with the limiter plugin and to check this i like to use this trick let's put this back to its default let's edit this plug-in let's scroll down under slider let's add a few lines of code we'll type in slider two equals slider one and then we'll put a semicolon at the end hit save and now if we move the fader on the threshold the ceiling goes with it it keeps both values the same it's a nice trick for hearing the artifacts of this plugin without the volume getting louder we can adjust that later what's here what's happening notice it starts to sound pretty bad so we want to use this very lightly [Music] i think right about there sounds pretty good and now we could delete those lines of code right here and save it and now we could bring up our ceiling by double clicking it towards the fall so our mix should be a bit louder and if we render it or render preview it it's not clipping and our loft's level or the perceived loudness is a bit louder but if you don't need that in many situations you don't you don't really need to make you mix this loud we just avoid our clipping by putting this back to zero and now we still avoid any clipping and keep the original mix exactly as we heard it or if you're not worried about how loud your mix is just adjust the volume of the master fader to completely avoid clipping so that's pretty much it that's how to avoid clipping your mixes in reaper i hope you learned something hope you can use it and i'll see you next time thanks bingo boys let's go you

Channel: REAPER Mania

Views: 12,005

Rating: 4.9843445 out of 5

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Id: MSstNb5VKgI

Length: 10min 7sec (607 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 09 2021