Axe-Fx II thinks it's clipping but I don't hear it

M

MetalGarret

Inspired
I could use a second pair of ears here. I'm using the Axe FX II as an interface with Pro Tools. The clip linked here has a mix I'm really happy with so far but I just realized that the clip light on the Axe FX II is lighting up but I don't hear it in the mix and none of the meters in the session are lighting up red. Is that normal? Can anyone hear clipping at all in this clip?

 
The USB signal itself is probably not actually clipping if Pro Tools is not showing clipping on its meters. Really hot USB signals can clip at the output converters after it gets mixed in with Output 1 if the USB return level is set high. Try turning down your USB Return Level in the I/O menu a little bit and see if that fixes it.
 
mr_fender said:
The USB signal itself is probably not actually clipping if Pro Tools is not showing clipping on its meters. Really hot USB signals can clip at the output converters after it gets mixed in with Output 1 if the USB return level is set high. Try turning down your USB Return Level in the I/O menu a little bit and see if that fixes it.
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What he said. Also, clipping will start happening well before your ears can actually hear it.
 
RoketRdr said:
What he said. Also, clipping will start happening well before your ears can actually hear it.
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Hmm ok. So to be clear, so long as I don't see my meters in the red there's no chance my tracks are clipping, right? Tracks don't clip before they hit the red ever, correct? Reason I'm asking is cause I submitted a track to OCRemix.org (a video game music remix website) and the judges rejected it cause of hot mixing and clipping everywhere but I couldn't hear it on my end. I thought that was odd.
 
Looking at the waveform of the posted clip itself, you're getting right up to 0 dB, but it doesn't seem to be clipping. Just pull your levels back a bit and give yourself a touch of headroom. You can always normalize to bring the final mix level up if needed, but once you're mixed too hot there's nothing you can do.

You're usually well into clipping once you can actually hear it. Louder isn't always better. Two words: Death Magnetic.
 
MetalGarret said:
Hmm ok. So to be clear, so long as I don't see my meters in the red there's no chance my tracks are clipping, right? Tracks don't clip before they hit the red ever, correct? Reason I'm asking is cause I submitted a track to OCRemix.org (a video game music remix website) and the judges rejected it cause of hot mixing and clipping everywhere but I couldn't hear it on my end. I thought that was odd.
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Ignore the meters on the AxeFX. The meters in your DAW will always be better for this purpose. If you use the DAW meters instead of the AxeFX meters, you'll be able to see things like true intermodulation peaks, loudness, overload indicators, greater detail, phase, cresting, etc. The clipping that probably got you rejected was true peaks. But as Mr. Fender says, these days it's also important to measure LUFS.
 
mr_fender said:
Looking at the waveform of the posted clip itself, you're getting right up to 0 dB, but it doesn't seem to be clipping. Just pull your levels back a bit and give yourself a touch of headroom. You can always normalize to bring the final mix level up if needed, but once you're mixed too hot there's nothing you can do.

You're usually well into clipping once you can actually hear it. Louder isn't always better. Two words: Death Magnetic.
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Ah yes. I remember. A tragic victim of the loudness war. Haha

By "normalize" do you mean "limit"? Cause the reason I'm hitting 0db like that is cause of the FG-X limiter I put on the master. Is normalizing different?

Actually, I found that my drums were peaking pretty bad so I dropped them by -4db and remixed the guitar and bass around them. I was actually able to get the mix up to a nominal volume with a less squashed sound this way. My kick and snare are particularly more punchy too. Matter of fact, I had parallel compression for them to give them an extra bit of hit but once I remixed everything I had to take it out cause it was too much.
 
Normalizing is taking the track and adjusting the level so a chosen part of the track hits a defined level. Peak normalization uses the highest peak in the track as the reference point. RMS normalization uses the average RMS level of the track as the reference. So if your mix has a few dB of headroom left and you want to make it as loud as possible, you can peak normalize to 0 dBFS and it will boost the level up so that the highest peak on your track will hit 0 dBFS. Doing that is a fast way to boost the signal as much as possible with no clipping and no changes to dynamics.

Limiting is different. That is actually squashing any signal that would go above, down to a set threshold. Limiting is basically compression with an infinite ratio. In a sense, clipping is a very crude form of hard limiting.
 
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mr_fender said:
Normalizing is taking the track and adjusting the level so a chosen part of the track hits a defined level. Peak normalization uses the highest peak in the track as the reference point. RMS normalization uses the average RMS level of the track as the reference. So if your mix has a few dB of headroom left and you want to make it as loud as possible, you can peak normalize to 0 dBFS and it will boost the level up so that the highest peak on your track will hit 0 dBFS. Doing that is a fast way to boost the signal as much as possible with no clipping and no changes to dynamics.

Limiting is different. That is actually squashing any signal that would go above, down to a set threshold. Limiting is basically compression with an infinite ratio. In a sense, clipping is a very crude form of hard limiting.
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Interesting. Ok. So let's say I print the song so I can master it. I'd normalize the song first then use the limiter? Or just use normalizing instead of limiting? So far I'm ok with just limiting with the way I have the mix now cause it's way better than what I had. But I just wanna know if using another method would be better or not.
 
Unless you want to add a compressor for creative reasons, just normalize prior to mastering. A limiter wouldn’t make sense at this stage.
 
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