Did you know REAPER includes over 250 audio effects? JS Effect Spotlight is a series of articles highlighting the often overlooked JS effects included with REAPER.
The Soft_Clipper effect written by Shwa is another hidden gem in the JS effects bundle and one I use a lot in mixing rock music.
A soft clipper takes the loudest peaks and rounds them off. Often this is a more effective way of increasing loudness than a brickwall limiter, it doesn’t pump!
Pushing it hard can cause distortion but when clipping off a couple dB either on a master or individual tracks it can be very transparent.
The JS soft_clipper has only two controls:
Boost increases the input up to 9dB
Output brickwall is the ceiling or absolute max output level which can be set from -3 and +1 dBFS
You can use this on your master bus either before or in place of a brickwall limiter. I find it very useful on kick and snare tracks where I need them to be loud but not actually take up headroom.
Got a favorite JS effect? Let us know in the comments below.
Comments
14 responses to “JS Effect Spotlight: Soft_Clipper”
RT @reaperblog: New Post – JS Effect Spotlight: Soft_Clipper: http://t.co/1aMYvpXY
My favorite JSFX is LOSER’s Zero Crossings Maximizer. I use it on every project. Another good JSFX is the tonegenerator. Useful tool.
Nice idea to speak about JS effects. There are so many and I don’t know them enough.
I like hq9000/multifreaq as a spectrum analyzer,
3BandSplitter and 3bandJoiner to dome some multiband processing (no phase issues, sounds perfectly)
Those 3 I’ve never knew about, exactly why I started this series. Thanks for the comment.
I often use 50HzKicker or HugeBooty for enhancing kick drums if it’s absolutely necessary, floaty delay, and the 1175 compressor. I also really like the Compciter on snare.
even more JS plugins I haven’t tried. Adding these to the list.
Great tipp, it’s still a big mystery with these JS plugins, but so far great hints. I kinda like the sound from Soft Clipper. Thanks
Thanks! Worked great for my handclaps.
Great tip. I have always used GVst GClip for this, but I tried it side by side with Soft Clipper and couldn’t tell the difference. I’m all in for using as much Reaper’s stock plugins as possible. The only thing that bothered me is that the -3dB threshold slider range is way too shy for my needs. I usually clip my snare peaks at -12dB, so I came up with this little guide of how to let you clip as much as you want.
1) Open Soft Clipper
2) Click on the “EDIT…” button
3) Click on the “Open in external editor” button
4) Find line 8:
slider2:{-3,1,0.1}output brick wall dBHere you can change the slider range. I usually swap -3 to -20, so it looks like this this:
slider2:0{-20,1,0.1}output brick wall dB5) Save and close the text file
6) Click on “Full recompile/reset” button and close the window.
7) Notice that now the second slider can clip up to -20dB.
ps: the blog ate the numbers “tags” on step 4. It should look like this:
4) Find line 8:
slider2:{-3,1,0.1}output brick wall dB
Here you can change the slider range. I usually swap -3 to -20, so it looks like this this:
slider2:0{-20,1,0.1}output brick wall dB
Thanks for that. I fixed your first comment.
dsa, I liked your suggestion and in fact used it. but recently compared an original snare waveform against a stem to see just what was going on at the limit. Which as you would expect was clipped (flat). Now I’m not sure how much practical harmonic distortion this adds since it is just the leading snare hit, but that led me to glance at the code and to my surprise noticed it is an emulation of a tube mastering plugin, and in addition I noticed another hard coded limit of -9dB (basleine_threshold_db) at line 21. Being the lazy guy I am, that was about as far as I went into the code, but now I am wondering if this limit also has to be changed in some way to account for the tube curve being modeled (in addition to your suggested slider adjustment), in order to have a better saturation response. just wondering.
please how can i get this soft clipper
included with reaper, in the JS folder.