OneCornerClip

TL;DW: An ultimate full-bandwidth clipper.

OneCornerClip

It’s great to patiently develop and improve subtleties like nonlinear DAW mixers and dithers and such, but now and then it’s very satisfying to just drop a bomb.

Boom ;)

OneCornerClip works like this: it’s like ADClip, except it spreads out the onset to clipping over possibly many samples. They converge upon the maximum possible output, which means the front edge of a clip takes on a continuous curve, moving its energy down into lower frequencies where the clippage is less bright and gritty, and more brutal and ballsy.

Then, on departing the clip, the waveform just snaps instantly to the next unclipped value, with no attempt to soften: so your waveshaping ends up getting one corner (on departing the clip) and one rounded onset (entering the clip).

What this means is, you can smash this with bass and it’ll remain bassy. Smash it with midrange and it’ll be middy. It shapes itself to the needs of your track, the distortion taking on the character of what you’re putting in. And that means, you can slam stuff absurdly hard through this while retaining character… and you can retain size and scale and depth.

I didn’t really design it for 2-buss mastering duties though I’m sure it’ll find some use there. It’s more a technical experiment that came to life and ate Tokyo. I think it’ll do great for nasty industrial noise, for obliterating drum room tracks, just a whole bunch of uses: because this isn’t a special purpose effect. It’s a big fat dirty distortion, and that makes it more flexible than bright gritty distortions, in that it can wear your frequency balance like a mask. It IS still distortion, so you won’t be using it for clean things. But it’s also very good at soaking up brief clips without revealing itself, so it’s not an insane choice for subtler use. I keep it at 0.618 for general use: that gets a good range of tones.

Hope you like it. I know this is going to be Xmas Morning for some folks (or whatever your equivalent would be). Enjoy the present.

This work is supported by my Patreon, and the more of that there is, the more insurance I have that I’ll keep on doing this stuff for years on end. (these days I open source new things, so me doing it sort of helps everybody). Funny I should mention insurance, I replaced my car last year when the old one died, and it turns out the insurance on the newer one (weaker, nicer, still making payments) is four times what the old junker’s insurance was. Yikes! So I am extra glad of you patrons, and it turns out I’m not quite done starving (of course, I’m also doing a lot of research, but it does mean I gotta budget carefully). And certain wild projects can’t happen as quickly as I might like. But the plugins are the core of everything, and thankfully those can go on rain or shine, snow or more snow (hey, it’s still Vermont up here) :)