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Post by Johnkenn on Jul 11, 2017 7:00:35 GMT -6
I've been mixing quite a bit of stuff where vocals were cut without compression. (Shocking!) Anyway, verses were obviously much softer than chorus' and I've been using clip gain to roughly match them. Even with Tim phrases. Best compression I've ever used lol.
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Post by Johnkenn on Jul 11, 2017 7:01:15 GMT -6
Obviously I'm not the first person to ever figure that out...just don't know why I don't employ that more often.
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Post by NoFilterChuck on Jul 11, 2017 7:15:29 GMT -6
a lot of mixers don't even use compression. they just automate every track, and that's how they keep the dynamic range limited to 6-12db per track. seems like a tedious process to me lol
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Post by svart on Jul 11, 2017 7:24:54 GMT -6
So this "clip gain" is just pre-insert volume automation?
Hmm. Never knew there was a name for it. I've been doing that for years.
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Post by jcoutu1 on Jul 11, 2017 7:34:42 GMT -6
Yep svart. Johnkenn, clip gain is boss. I use it ALLLLLLL the time. I'll clip gain parts of my verse to balance things out. Do the same to the chorus, just a touch louder, then when the verse and chorus hit the compressor, you get a little extra push and comp on the chorus while keeping the sections nicely balanced.
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Post by svart on Jul 11, 2017 9:28:39 GMT -6
Yep svart. Johnkenn, clip gain is boss. I use it ALLLLLLL the time. I'll clip gain parts of my verse to balance things out. Do the same to the chorus, just a touch louder, then when the verse and chorus hit the compressor, you get a little extra push and comp on the chorus while keeping the sections nicely balanced. I'll do one of two things after I chop up the vocal tracks into phrases. I'll either normalize each phrase, or do volume automation if I need to do more complex stuff. Since I only use outboard processing on vocals, the automation is inherently pre-insert.
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Post by M57 on Jul 11, 2017 10:43:15 GMT -6
I've been aware of clip gain for a while now and even tried it once or twice. I can see how it might work fine for many but I decided I don't necessarily like it. Here's my thinking. Clip gain is pre-inserts, while automation is post insert, which means that when you clip gain you are taking a part of the performance that was sung too quietly and boosting it before processing. In theory, this way everything gets an equal amount of processing. Now that makes a certain amount of sense, but let's take a more extreme example where the chorus is a louder than the verses and the singer is screaming all the time. Let's say you have a compressor inserted. By clip gaining and boosting the section in the chorus you're going to crush the snot out of your singer, and only on the verses. Now, when you don't use clip gain and use automation instead, you end up more consistently compressing your singer from a tonal point of view, and fader moves enable the singer to float on top of the bed. Now consider the opposite - the singer is purposely singing softer in the verses. Clip gain is going to force less compression on those soft parts, making them harder to glue to the mix. Or maybe I don't understand and have it all backwards. I suppose using only 1 or 2db of clip gain won't make that much difference, but I find I can apply automation with or 3 or 4 clicks and a mouse drag. It's the same amount of effort and gives me much more control over held notes, not to mention down the road when I'm tweaking things - those edit points are there ready and waiting. Also, I just don't like the idea of the noise floor clicking up and down. I'm sure it's negligible, but it just seems non-musical to me. And honestly, either way, I'm going to end up automating.
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Post by Johnkenn on Jul 11, 2017 11:03:32 GMT -6
I look at it like this...If I'm using compression to pull up the soft verse parts, the chorus that are loud get smashed. If I set my comp to make the loudest parts shine and then bring the verses up in volume manually, the comp never gets smashed. The energy of the softer parts is still the same, the volume is just basically ridden.
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Post by NoFilterChuck on Jul 11, 2017 11:15:06 GMT -6
I've been aware of clip gain for a while now and even tried it once or twice. I can see how it might work fine for many but I decided I don't necessarily like it. Here's my thinking. Clip gain is pre-inserts, while automation is post insert, which means that when you clip gain you are taking a part of the performance that was sung too quietly and boosting it before processing. In theory, this way everything gets an equal amount of processing. Now that makes a certain amount of sense, but let's take a more extreme example where the chorus is a louder than the verses and the singer is screaming all the time. Let's say you have a compressor inserted. By clip gaining and boosting the section in the chorus you're going to crush the snot out of your singer, and only on the verses. Now, when you don't use clip gain and use automation instead, you end up more consistently compressing your singer from a tonal point of view, and fader moves enable the singer to float on top of the bed. Now consider the opposite - the singer is purposely singing softer in the verses. Clip gain is going to force less compression on those soft parts, making them harder to glue to the mix. Or maybe I don't understand and have it all backwards. I suppose using only 1 or 2db of clip gain won't make that much difference, but I find I can apply automation with or 3 or 4 clicks and a mouse drag. It's the same amount of effort and gives me much more control over held notes, not to mention down the road when I'm tweaking things - those edit points are there ready and waiting. Also, I just don't like the idea of the noise floor clicking up and down. I'm sure it's negligible, but it just seems non-musical to me. And honestly, either way, I'm going to end up automating. think of clip gain as pre-insert Automation. For example, this allows you to hit your compressor plugins with the same signal level for the entire song, if you wanted your lead vox to only have a dynamic range of 6db before it hits any plugins.
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Post by rowmat on Jul 11, 2017 11:49:09 GMT -6
I've pretty much stopped using compression while tracking unless it's something like an LA2A style limiter just tickling the signal.
Tracking clients and bands you have no prior experience with often means dealing with wildly fluctuating dynamics during the course of a take.
Unless you know how much and where those big changes are occurring (and they are often inconsistent on each take although invariably getting louder with each) I would just rather keep the record gains lower to ensure no clipping occurs than wind up slamming a compressor or limiter so hard that it sounds it. 24bit digital gives us the luxury to do this.
Example: During sound and level checking you set the drum compressors to average around say 3-5db of compression. By the second take you look at the compressors and they're hitting 8-10db of gain reduction or even more. So you have to now lower your preamp gains before take three which can affect the vibe if they want to immediately go straight into take three and have to wait even 10 seconds for you to reset the preamp gains.
If a vocal is very dynamic to the point it goes from a whisper to a scream then, rather than kill the vibe by tracking the loud and quiet parts separately, use a mic splitter or mult the mic into two identical preamps set to low and medium gains say 15db or 20db apart and record each to a separate track simultaneously. (This sounds a darn sight better than using compressor that is doing nothing on the whispers but still ends up slamming the screams too hard.)
Then comp the vocal take using the higher gain track for quiet stuff until it gets too hot or clips and then use those sections from the un-clipped lower gain track. This gets the overall vocal level in the ballpark.
After that tweak (clip gain etc) to taste in the mix.
Obviously if you are recording yourself you know what your dynamics are like and can play around with as many takes as you like. Generally we get a maximum of three takes when tracking clients so not having to worry about dynamics processor settings actually makes it easier.
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Post by Johnkenn on Jul 11, 2017 12:47:26 GMT -6
Or track with a Sta-level
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Post by Deleted on Jul 11, 2017 12:52:23 GMT -6
I look at it like this...If I'm using compression to pull up the soft verse parts, the chorus that are loud get smashed. I think I'm right in saying VCA comps ( which many ITB comps are modelled after ) will do this, but opto and maybe vari-mu's may be a better option on a dynamic track?
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Post by rowmat on Jul 11, 2017 13:02:48 GMT -6
Or track with a Sta-level A dozen of them?
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Post by NoFilterChuck on Jul 12, 2017 7:48:04 GMT -6
Or track with a Sta-level A dozen of them? Hell yeah! Go big or go home, right?
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Post by adamjbrass on Jul 12, 2017 11:59:33 GMT -6
clip gain is da bomb
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Post by Guitar on Jul 12, 2017 17:24:36 GMT -6
I use clip gain all the dang time. Not quite as much lately, for some reason. But it's one thing that Cubase has had right for a very long time. It was one of the immediate things I latched onto when I started with Cubase.
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Post by jazznoise on Jul 13, 2017 2:34:55 GMT -6
I use pre-fx volume automation in Reaper, basically the same thing. Means if I want to be subtle I can be, or if stylistically we're looking for a more compressed sound I can do it consistently. I sometimes run a limiter on the vocal on the way in, or just set it up so that my Art pre clips the peaks on the hottest parts to tame it.
More and more, for songs with big changes I'll break up the vocals and guitars into verse and chorus tracks and process them differently. Often the demands are just not the same.
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Post by reddirt on Jul 13, 2017 2:40:30 GMT -6
I asked in an earlier thread if there was a fader which could be the 1st insert at the top of the channel and can be automated like any fader ; it becomes an automatable quasi-clip gain which to me would be the duck's; in the absence of a fader I insert an eq but just automate the gain and turn the eq's off. Hardly ideal but it's the best I came up with. Used as you want it, clip gain can be ultra useful particularly in keeping things sounding natural and not choked by compression.
Cheers. Ross
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Post by NoFilterChuck on Jul 13, 2017 6:18:13 GMT -6
reddirt what DAW are you using? almost every DAW has a dedicated gain plugin that you can flip phase/make mono/attenuate/boost with.
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Post by Ward on Jul 13, 2017 6:28:38 GMT -6
You can't actually compress with clip gain, but you manually control level, so fader rider style leveling... expert level! The achieved results will be there.
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Post by viciousbliss on Jul 14, 2017 16:18:58 GMT -6
I use pro tools clip gain on everything and never thought it made stuff sound worse.
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Post by ChaseUTB on Jul 14, 2017 17:32:24 GMT -6
I use pro tools clip gain on everything and never thought it made stuff sound worse. It doesn't make anything sound worse ....
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Post by noah shain on Jul 15, 2017 8:55:12 GMT -6
A little off topic but trim automation is pretty useful along these lines. It's post insert. I'll do some automating early in a mix with trim to get things leveled out a little before I go too deep. That way you have some basic leveling automation but you can still grab a fader and move it without it snapping back to the old level when you let go. Can be pretty handy.
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Post by notneeson on Jul 15, 2017 16:47:44 GMT -6
So this "clip gain" is just pre-insert volume automation? Hmm. Never knew there was a name for it. I've been doing that for years. If anything, it's the GUI implementation of clip gain that rocks.
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Post by notneeson on Jul 15, 2017 16:50:17 GMT -6
A little off topic but trim automation is pretty useful along these lines. It's post insert. I'll do some automating early in a mix with trim to get things leveled out a little before I go too deep. That way you have some basic leveling automation but you can still grab a fader and move it without it snapping back to the old level when you let go. Can be pretty handy. Interesting, I never thought about doing it that way! I will often pull out some gain on the first insert, and use VCAs and automation, but I have always applied trim auto last. Great tip.
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