Need help with volume

[theguitarplayer]

So I'm working on this song with side-chain compression in it, and I've I got a certain sound I'm satisfied with. However, in order for that sound to be good it needs to clip in the mixer. This forces me to turn the volume far down or it would be too loud. Now that leaves me with a small space to operate volume control in. So I tried moving the master volume so it wouldn't be so loud but that either removed or add to the clipping and distortion which was bad. I also tried amplifier in the effects and that, also, effects the clipping which was the same problem.

My question:
Is their a way to avoid changes in distortion and clipping but still increase or decrease volume?

This would let me adjust my speaker volume to the center, and when others listen to the song they won't have to turn their speakers down.

Thanks a lot!

[diiz]

It doesn't need to clip in the mixer... that's the absolute worst way of clipping a signal, because when you "clip" your signal by overdriving it in the mixer, the actual exported output doesn't actually clip - it just goes above 0dB, and then if you open your exported .wav in eg. Audacity and normalize the track, it'll just see the "clipped" part as overload and normalize it to 0dB so that the rest of your song gets way too quiet. You can see the same effect in action when you adjust the master volume - when you turn the master vol down, less of it "clips"...

What you want to do is instead use a plugin to clip your sound before it goes to the mixer (or in the mixer fx channel, both ways work), then adjust the volume after that. You can use the "Clip" LADSPA plugin if you just need to do a simple treshold clip, OR - if you want to get fancy with it - you can use my Waveshaper plugin to do all kinds of fun, weird and awesome clipping/distortion effects, and the Waveshaper even comes with pre/post amplification controls so you only need the one plugin for all your clipping/distortion/amplification needs.

[theguitarplayer]

ok, thanks for the advice, I might use your waveshaper. Though I'm not very experienced with all that.

[diiz]

Using the waveshaper is very simple.

When you open it, the default graph is a straight diagonal line. The graph represents the amplitude range between 0-1.0 (or -inf-0 in dBV scale) so that the horizontal axis represents input amplitude and vertical axis is output. So when the graph is a diagonal line, that mean it maps the amplitude linaerily, ie. with no change.

Now then, if you want the signal to clip at, say, 0.5 amplitude (in dBV: around -6), you would draw a straight line from the center of the graph to the center of the right edge (you can draw straight lines by shift-clicking). Thus, every input amplitude from 0.5 and up would be translated to 0.5. Basically, it would be clipping the signal at 0.5.

But you have more control over the signal, since you can draw any shape you want, and basically manipulate the waveform in any way you want. So you see, the graph directly corresponds to the waveform shape, hence the term "waveshaper".

The input and output knobs are simple: input knob applies amplification before the waveshaping, output after.

[theguitarplayer]

sounds great!

whoops! forgot where it was, link pls?

[diiz]

It's included with LMMS 1.0.

[theguitarplayer]

obviously I'm still somewhere in the 18th century