Title The Clip-To-Zero Production Strategy ✅

The Clip-To-Zero Production Strategy Gainstaging and Mixing by Loudness, not by Peak Why should you care? Maybe you have no idea how to make good-sounding LOUD masters. Maybe you do know a lot of the basics for making loud masters, but you struggle with unpredictable results in every project and need to slap down a lot of bandaids during mastering to “fix the mix”. Maybe you don’t care about playing in the loudness war (instead preferring the wider dynamic range afforded by streaming platforms), but you find that every song presents an entirely different puzzle to mix and master well, and you just want to get faster and more consistent at this routine engineering side of music production. Who this is for The CTZ strategy is a moderately advanced production approach, and it’s suitable for ALL loudness targets. You can use the CTZ strategy to make loudness war bangers or relatively quiet and dynamic songs that use the full dynamic range of Spotify, YouTube, Tidal, Apple Music, etc. If you are a newer producer, you might struggle with some of the concepts and techniques that are central to the CTZ strategy (but you can eventually grasp it all if you take your time and puzzle it out). If you are a moderately experienced producer who is really starting to tackle the concepts/techniques of self-mixing and self-mastering, you will probably find the CTZ strategy extremely useful. If you’re a pro mix engineer or pro mastering engineer with a lot of outboard equipment, the CTZ strategy probably isn’t going to work well for you. The CTZ strategy is meant for producers who self-mix and self-master 100% in-the-box, so that they can safely run the signal at much hotter levels than is ideal for pushing signal back and forth between your DAW and outboard analog gear. Who is DubSkald/Baphometrix? Relax. I’m not here to sell you anything. I do education and technical writing for a living. It’s easy for me to absorb complex subject matter and explain it to other people. I thrashed long and hard on this stuff and am just sharing some knowledge to help the next generation leapfrog even further ahead. I do this for free, for fun, as time permits, and on my schedule. If you feel like giving something back in return, just do me a solid and go follow my two artist brands on Spotify (DubSkald | Baphometrix), and subscribe to my Baphometrix channel on YouTube.
You can read an interview about me, if you like. But the short story is that I’ve been a stage musician for many years, and was the defacto sound engineer for all my bands back then. When I retired from stage performance I went into music production. I like heavy, aggressive music and steered towards the modern festival-oriented bass music genres, where I quickly hit a brick wall on the mixing and mastering side of things. Luckily, I was fortunate to have access to some very good mentors while learning to surmount this challenge. Mastering for loudness is fairly tough and requires you to break a lot of the established rules about mixing and mastering. It also requires you to make some entirely new rules, and I can attest that nearly every engineer who’s excellent at making clean but loud masters has their own pet strategy and pet tools and pet workflow for doing so. (But they all share some common best practices that are unique to the challenge of loudness.) I’m no different. Over time, I’ve taken the concepts and techniques my mentors taught me, adapted them to my own workflow and experimentation, and have come up with my own pet strategy that I call The Clip-to-Zero Production Strategy. In turn, you will probably end up taking the elements from my CTZ strategy that work for you, discarding the elements that don’t work for you, and coming up with your own pet strategy over time! As for why I have two artist brands? Baphometrix is my brand for loud, heavy, festival-oriented bass music. A lot of my Baphometrix stuff never ends up on the major platforms because it’s designed for use in my live sets. Baphometrix is also who I “teach” as on YouTube. DubSkald is my alter-ego brand for a quieter, more dynamic, more chill, downtempo type of music designed only for streaming platforms and YouTube. DubSkald songs aren’t structured to be ideal for DJs and live mixing. They’re structured to be a pleasant ride for the streaming audience and to grab their attention quickly when the song rolls through on a “radio” playlist. Is CTZ a common practice? Lots of producers and mix/mastering engineers use something similar to (or exactly like) the CTZ Strategy, even if they don’t call it by that name or think of it as such. You literally cannot make a good-sounding loud master without using clippers (and/or saturation/distortion/etc--all of which are simply “colored” clipping) liberally on many tracks and busses in your project. You literally cannot just let a bunch of raw, high dynamic range signals sum together into a big spiky caterpillar on the mixbus and do ONE round of massive clipping and/or limiting to squeeze that huge dynamic range on a complex signal down into a small dynamic range that is competitively loud. It just does NOT work, and will make your master sound distorted, squashed, flat, rubbery, fuzzy, harsh, and lifeless. So no, this is not entirely the unique invention of Baphometrix/DubSkald. Every producer/engineer who works in loud genres eventually stumbles across the “Aha!” moment where they realize that working at very loud gainstaging levels (close to or at 0 pre-fader) across all their tracks and busses, and doing lots of small amounts of clipping everywhere, is MUCH better than working at a low gainstaging level and a huge dynamic range and then trying to shove that into a mastering limiter and squash all that down in one pass. I didn’t invent this. At least not all of this. My unique contribution was mostly centered around how to formalize this into a repeatable, consistent, teachable method. My personal aha! moment was finally realizing that I could just make 0 dBFS the clipping threshold across the entire project, and that I could apply the concept of a VCA fader across every source track to surgically control how much the entire mix was getting pushed into that clipping threshold set firmly at 0 dBFS. I’ve never seen nor heard of anyone else doing that. So I tested the concept hard for a year, then started to explain it, how it works, and how to do it. I don’t know of anyone else who has tried to do this.
So.... if you don’t want to take my word for it that lots of small clips distributed throughout your project are better than one huge clip at the end (in your mastering limiter), would you take the word of Luca Pretolesi? A mix/mastering engineer who specializes in EDM and Pop and has multiple grammy awards? Check out this quote from Luca in a Q&A video about a mixing masterclass he did in 2020. Luca Quote where he says that you should do lots of clipping all over the project. Yeah yeah, so Luca echoing what I’m advocating isn’t enough to convince you? How about ediT from The Glitch Mob? Here’s my friend and (amazing) mentor ill.Gates relating a conversation he had with ediT about some live performance directions they were each working on in early 2022, where ediT mentioned that he really took a lot of inspiration from my videos about the CTZ strategy. Want to hear examples of the CTZ Strategy? If you’re looking for published music that was produced with the CTZ Strategy, start with my DubSkald stuff. I formalized the CTZ Strategy in March/April 2020. Anything I produced before that date as Baphometrix was following a variety of different strategies for gainstaging, mixing, and loudness--and not always with the most consistent quality results. There are also several videos on my Baphometrix YouTube channel that demonstrate the CTZ strategy. I’ll be linking those specific videos further below in the sections that explain how to do the CTZ strategy. You can also check out a great YouTube channel by Tutorial[ism] where Craig Lopez tries out the CTZ Strategy for the first time and compares it against the mix that he first did the traditional way. Trying a New Technique for Mixing LOUD!!!!! (Clip-To-Zero?!?) Then there’s Dash Hawkins - the artist Glitch, aka the YouTube educator Dash Glitch - who is a really amazing Psytrance producer as well as a prolific creator of excellent production tutorials on YouTube. You can check out a video where Dash shows a great AB comparison of a mix/master he did the traditional way versus re-doing that same mix the CTZ way (with a little creative adaptation). The AB comparison at the end tells a very compelling story. Check it out here: Control Your Dynamics From the Ground Up - Clip-To-Zero Mixing Method in Practice. What is the CTZ Strategy in nutshell? You’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase “Mastering is in the mix”. This is a truism, and it’s especially true if you produce in the louder genres. If you work the old school way at low overall loudness levels with lots of headroom on your track meters, make a nice-sounding mix, and then expect to push that up to a competitive loudness target on the Master track, you’ll be sorely disappointed with the results. (In fact, that’s probably why you’re reading this right now--because you’re stuck at exactly this point in your skillset.) To hit competitive loudness targets as cleanly as possible--and with no thrashing or unpredictability and rework of your entire mix--you can’t wait until the mixing stage to start setting up your project for loudness. Instead, you set yourself up for potential loudness with your early gainstaging right at the very beginning of a project as you bring in your most important framework sounds (or anchor sounds), around which your entire arrangement and mix is built.
So the CTZ strategy is essentially a “mastering is in the gainstaging and the mix” approach to production. Old-school gainstaging versus CTZ gainstaging All the classic old-school advice tells you to leave headroom of -6 dBFS on your mix bus (your Master track), “so that you leave the mastering engineer some room to work”. Therefore, you’re typically advised to set your loudest project sounds (typically your kicks and/or snares and/or vocals--at least in most electronic genres) to PEAK at something like -12 dB on your track meters. By the time you level all your other sounds up into this “framework” of the loudest sounds in the track, all the signals typically sum up to hit somewhere around -6 on the Master track (give or take a few dB in either direction). In 2020, this is old advice. This is outdated advice. This is advice designed by engineers and producers who worked primarily by recording live bands through analog gear, and then mixed and mastered those bands at least in part through analog gear. Starting around 2012-ish, personal computers and DAW software and soft synths and FX processing plugins had all become powerful enough that producers in electronic and dance genres could do everything from start to finish “100% in the box” without a single piece of analog gear except for your audio interface and speakers/headphones. And your DAW isn’t limited by worries about the noise floor of analog equipment. Your DAW isn’t limited by the fact that analog gear is mostly calibrated to work best with an average signal loudness near -18 RMS. There isn’t even really a 0 dBFS ceiling in all the tracks and busses of your DAW, because internally it processes all signals at 32-bit floating point, which means your peaks can go WAY into the red above 0 on the track meters and be perfectly fine. In 2020, the only hard and fast rule is that anything you print to a file (such as your exported master WAVs) or send out of the DAW into your audio interface and analog monitors/headphones must be at or below 0 dBFS to prevent hard clipping the DACs on the way to your speakers/headphones. Fortunately, in the CTZ strategy, you don’t ever need or want to clip your Master track into the red. You will learn how to clip, and you’ll clip everywhere, but in an intentional, controlled, clean, and predictable way. And if you care about True Peak and keeping it under 0 dBTP, or even all the way down at -1.0 dBTP (because of the limitations of streaming platforms), it’s easy to adjust for that--and test for that--by using the CTZ strategy. So in the CTZ strategy, we throw almost all of the old-school advice about gainstaging out the window. For starters, we don’t really gainstage any of our tracks or busses by arbitrary--and low--peak values! Instead, we make the pre-fader peak of every track and every bus touch the ceiling right at 0 dBFS. Instead of focusing on the peak of every track and bus signal, we focus on the RMS/LUFS of every signal--it’s perceived loudness. We might even drive the peaks up into and past the 0 dBFS ceiling by using a clipper (or limiter) on individual tracks or busses, specifically to push the loudness of that track/bus up higher to exactly where we want it to sit in the mix. Why do we make the PRE-FADER peaks on our tracks/busses touch 0 and then potentially also push the peaks up above 0 into the ceiling of the clipper/limiter on that track/bus? Because this brings us three very important benefits that are central to the entire CTZ strategy. ● It enables you to accurately judge your early sound design and mixing decisions versus the reference tracks you’re using for comparison. All your reference tracks in louder genres? Those