Bad Clipping ALL OF THE SUDDEN

Cubase
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Cubase professionals, I need you!!:pray:

I should start by saying- Yes, I’m a noob to Cubase. I’m about 2 weeks in to the Cubase 13 trial and I’m now ready to give up on my music career haha I say that sarcastically of course, but really, these past few days have been very uninspiring and frustrating to say the very least.

I tried Cubase once before when I was a bit younger, but got discouraged rather quickly as it was VERY overwhelming to even look at. But now, years later, I thought to myself, " Hey, I’m an accomplished musician now. I’ve made a record (in a studio with producers & engineers who knew what the hell they were doing), I’ve toured all over the country, I have a random fan in Germany…” You know, the basics!

So fast forward to present day. I’m responsible for putting out another record but instead of doing the writing & pre-production in a stuffy studio, I wanted to do it from home this time around. It’s where I’m most comfortable, my dogs are here, bla bla bla. So I figured, it’s time to put my professional musician pants on, get out of Mickey Mouse Garageband & start working in a proper DAW.
I downloaded the trial version of Cubase 13 and the first week or so was FANTASTIC. The exploration alone felt so invigorating! Being able to write, produce & record a full track on my own without having to enlist the help of engineers or producer was quit liberating.

Fast forward, to the second week & it’s been an absolute crap show. Since there seems to be no existing DAW that has good stock guitar sims or plugins, I was forced to go outside of the cubase ecosystem to explore a good sounding guitar sim. Downloaded the Roots guitar sim from ML labs and have been experiencing nothing but problems ever since. I’m getting clipping on everything, all of the sudden, even when my levels/gain staging is showing no clips or dropouts. I immediately uninstalled the Roots plugin, but the problem stays. I’m getting horrible clipping on everything I do. That’s what I get for downloading a free plugin, I know… But how can I move forward? I’m on the trial run, so will uninstalling & reinstalling cause an issue? I just want to get back to creating again and get off all of these forums I’ve been on for the past few days trying to figure this out.

I was completely sold on Cubase until this happened and was totally prepared to dish out the money for the pro version. It really sucks that you have to be a full blown engineer to make decent sounding art. There’s literally nothing more uninspiring than dealing with these tedious little problems.

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Hello and welcome “to the other side” of using a DAW. To take over the job of what formerly several people have done for your is no small feat. Regardless of the DAW that is being used it takes time to become good at producing.

Regarding your clipping issue: What do you call clipping? Clicks and drop-outs, level too high, another form of distortion? Maybe you can even add an audio example so that we have an idea what your are referring to.

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As @Johnny_Moneto already mentioned, more information is needed on what you specifically mean here. I’d be extremely surprised if a virtual instrument plugin, even a free one, would be likely to clip (i.e. generate audio overs) on its own as I’d expect presets would be created with levels in mind (though some presets might have radically different levels from each other). (Side note: I definitely hear you on the virtual guitars front. I have used, and still use, many virtual guitars over the years, with some of my most used current ones coming from Acoustic Samples, MusicLab, Native Instruments, and UJAM. Then, of course, there is the adding amp sims for electric versions from NI, IK, Waves, and Overloud…)

If you aren’t seeing clipping in the waveforms (not applicable to an instrument track) or meters, but are hearing audible distortion through your headphones or speakers, it may be a matter of level adjustments between Cubase and your audio interface. Much of that is likely to be in what you set in your interface’s control panel or mixer app, as well as any hardware volume controls, but you Cubase Pro’s Control room lets you tweak monitoring levels (independent of track levels and stereo out levels) for various outputs (e.g. headphones, main speakers, etc.) directly from within Cubase.

If you’re seeing track level meters show reasonable levels, but are seeing group bus or stereo output controls showing too high of levels, just remember that downstream levels (e.g. for a group bus or the stereo output) add up from the tracks feeding them. For example, if you’ve got two tracks with peak levels at -6 dBFS at the same point in the track, the downstream peak will be significantly higher (0 dBFS maybe??? – I’m not sure how decibel math works to be honest, only that a reduction of 6 dBFS is like halving the volume level, thus my guess here, but other aspects like stereo pan laws probably come into play, as well).

If you’re seeing issues with artifacts in audio tracks, there could be driver issues on your system, where the something isn’t keeping up with the incoming audio and thus dropping samples, which could create audible clicks, crackling, etc. Trying different sample buffer settings for your interface (via the control panel) could help there, but also make sure you’re using a high caliber audio interface with a real ASIO driver, not a system sound card with something like ASIO4All or the Cubase Generic ASIO driver, which just emulate ASIO drivers above other layers of drivers, thus not being able to achieve the performance of a dedicated ASIO driver for the hardware.

To be honest, I’m surprised to hear your first week with Cubase was “fantastic”. It has such a high learning curve (in my case coming from SONAR back at Cubase 9.5 to start, though I didn’t get sufficiently comfortable to use it as my main DAW until 10.5). It is a seriously deep DAW, and some of the terminology is quite different from what I’ve seen elsewhere, the combination sometimes making it hard to find seemingly simple things prior to getting used to Cubase’s conventions. But there are lots of online resources for learning, and the power and flexibility ultimately pays off.

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Hey Johnny, thank you so much for your reply. I can tell this is going to be a supportive group which is greatly appreciated from a noob like me. What I regard as clipping is any kind of unpleasant clicks, unwanted distortion, light skips, all of the typical signs of a hot mic or input. The most confusing thing for me was that I was getting this awful clipping when my gain staging for the track appeared to be fine. Now, I’m still learning how to read these meters, frequencies, ect. I did a lot of gain staging research today to see what kind of improvements I can make. If I can figure out how to provide you with a sample like you suggested, I will certainly do so. That would be great. Again, I appreciate your reply, Johnny. :call_me_hand:

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Hey Rick,
I appreciate your reply. Thank you for taking the time to provide your insight. As a noob, I really appreciate it. I definitely think you’re onto something when it comes to insuring a sound relationship between the interface & the DAW, as well as the ASIO driver being up to date. Now, I am running on an older, quite basic interface in the Scarlette 2i2. I am planning on upgrading this week. Would love your insight on that if you have any. I’ve been looking at some of the Universal Audio interfaces like the Apollo. I’ve heard good things. As for the ASIO driver: how do I get a “real” ASIO driver? I have been using the generic low latency ASIO driver that comes onboard with Cubase.

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In case of your Scarlette go to the Focusrite web pages and search there for the ASIO driver. Installing and using that driver might already get rid of the majority of your issues.

An additional note: As soon as the audio is inside Cubase there cannot be clipping anymore (unless you use audio effects that purposefully introduce clipping). You have to make sure your recording levels are in a good range. Same applies for the output level, when you send the sound from Cubase to your monitors or headphones. Clipping can occur only there, not inside Cubase itself.
With clipping I refer to the actual clipping (for of digital distortion). You named some other items like clicks or skips. These are technically not called clipping (but rather clicks or drop-outs).

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Hi Drew, if you’re hearing clicks in audio recorded through your interface, I suspect an issue with the system and audio driver in keeping up. I’d expect the Scarlett 2i2 (and really any Focusrite interfaces) to be plenty adequate if you’re using their native ASIO drivers (and assuming your computer can keep up). It looks like their drivers page is at Focusrite | Focusrite Downloads but you have to know which generation of Scarlett you’re dealing with to select the right ones. I’d definitely avoid the Generic ASIO drivers, except in special cases (e.g. if you were traveling with a laptop and didn’t have an outboard interface, then you might need to use the built-in sound card temporarily).

If you’re getting actual distortion/clipping of audio on the way into Cubase, odds are it is gain staging on the interface side, or in the interface’s app for configuring levels into Cubase. In that case, it may just be a matter of setting the levels on the sound card or its mixer app to correspond to the signals you’re putting into it (e.g. from a mic/preamp, DI for a guitar, keyboard, etc.). But a real ASIO driver will probably also have more flexibility on the levels-setting side, too.

As to audio interface recommendations, I don’t really have much exposure to what is out there right now as I’ve had my current interface (MOTU 828x) since 2014. I was mainly looking at input/output configurability (e.g. I wanted a physical MIDI input, ADAT connectivity, extra inputs beyond just 2, and outputs that would be sufficient for 5.1 sound should I decide to do that at some point).
I also I liked that it could run under Thunderbolt II, though I only found out after I had it that that didn’t buy any extra performance as it still runs at USB 2 speeds. I’d had a MOTU 2048 mkII some years back, and I recognized MOTU as a reputable company in general, but I was coming of an EMU 1820M interface I’d been using for quite a few years in between, and I think there were driver or hardware configurability issues when I was building my then-new computer. I can’t say I’d recommend the 828x in that I really don’t like their mixer app – to confusing, and I’ve messed things up a few times when I’ve had to use it – and I also do have some issues with click-type artifacts when recording at times – there seems to be a luck of the draw issue there, though I’ve gotten more unlucky on that front with Cubase 13 – though it’s quite conceivable that relates more to my motherboard and/or other aspects of my system that to the interface itself.

There are plenty of threads on this forum where people talk about interface preferences and experiences, so you may want to check some of those for better info on that topic. Good luck with your shopping.