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As a mixing tool, it’s not often used, but can be extremely useful on hats that you want to add extra grit to. If you are using hard clipping, it’s because you want overly digital and distorted sounding audio to then resample, or use for creative effect.
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Hard Clipping also has its uses, but these are found more in the realm of electronic music sound design. This is a type of digital distortion that cuts the peaks of your audio off in a straight line, causing harsh artefacts to appear in your audio signal. The hardest thing about producing music inside a computer is re-creating that warm sound people miss, & soft clipping is a form of distortion you can use to get that one step closer. You and I can both agree that nothing sounds quite as great as a tape delay machine that produces warping, shifting echoes. But, with the advancement in audio technology, people miss the imperfections of old machines. It can add that extra layer of saturation that your music needs to sound gritty & imperfect.Įverything sounds so clean & clinical, & audio is a breeze to edit. It’s more subtle than the other kinds of distortion & works well when used in the right context. no clipping: original track clipping: original trackĪs you can hear, it creates a warm, analog vibe that you don’t get from other types of distortion such as hard clipping, overdrive & bitcrush. You wouldn’t usually use this much distortion in a real scenario. I have absolutely slammed the beans on this effect, so you’re able to hear how it sounds on and off. Now let’s have a listen to how it affects the audio with these 2 examples.
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Soft clipping, on the other hand, gives us a closer result to the original sine waveform that was run through the clipper.
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As you can see, hard clipping produces a result that’s very similar to a square wave &, as a result, gives us more of a harsh sounding signal.
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