A soft clipper is a type of audio signal processing effect that limits the amplitude of an input signal. It does this by gradually reducing the level of the source material as it approaches the maximum level that the clipper is set to e.g., 0 dBFS or -1 dBFS. This helps to prevent the audio material from becoming too distorted, particularly in the digital domain. However, in other genres of music distortion is more than welcome. It's the desired sound.

What is the difference between a soft clipper and a limiter?​

The difference between soft clippers and brickwall limiters is that often the latter can do what the former does. This is because many modern mastering limiters have optional parameters that you can fine-tune and pretty much make the magic happen. These parameters are namely: knee, attack time, release time, and lookahead time.

How do you turn a brickwall limiter into a soft clipper?​

To turn a mastering limiter into a soft clipper, you use the following settings as starting points:

Parameter​
Value​
Ceiling0 dBFS
AttackAs slow as possible e.g., greater than 100 ms
ReleaseAs fast as possible e.g., 10 ms or 1 ms
KneeYou want a gentle curve (or high values in dB)
Gain (threshold)Until you get about 4 to 6 dB in gain reduction
LookaheadOff (or zero)

Common usage​

Soft-clippers are usually used to achieve crunchy sound on musical instruments such as bass guitars, electric guitars, electric pianos (Rhodes or Wurlitzer), and a whole variety of sounds such as virtual studio synthesizers, kick drums (808s), or sometimes on lead vocals (VOX). You can also slap a soft-clipping plug-in on group channels (or buses) and then blend in the dry and wet signal to taste. The thing is the only rule is that there are no rules.

Should you put a soft clipper on the stereo master channel?​

Probably not. This usually makes sense if you are mastering music. You also don't want to give a human mastering engineer a stereophonic WAV file you have been fooling around with your stereo bus processing chain. It often doesn't give them a proper mixdown to work with. The same applies in the event that you want your song to be mastered by a robot or an online audio mastering service. You should turn it off or delete the plug-in from the effect slot before you do a final render in your digital audio workstation.
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