need help to explain bizarre clipping with plugins

i’ve got a number of soundclips on a track where the gain is set to -5db. all soundclips have been normalized to unity gain before being imported. i have a vst called ‘guitar rig’ by native instruments as an insert on the track.

for some strange reason, when i’m playing back the track, the level meter shows clipping at +3db right at the beginning of the clip, on every clip. this doesn’t happen when i disable the plugin. i can slip-edit the soundclip adding a fade at the beginning, and this attenuates the level – gradually [in fact, it doesn’t completely go away unless i fade in over an entire measure ! ]. there doesn’t appear to be a genuine spike there, because when i export the audio and examine it in wave editor, all levels are well below 0 and no clipping is reported.

anybody have any ideas about what’s happening here ?

thanks !

all soundclips have been normalized to unity gain before being imported

You can’t normalise to unity gain…unity is the level within a peice of kit (or within the Cubase mixer) at which your clip plays back at the same level of the original.

You can normalise to an amount measured in db relative to 0.

Normalising at all is pretty much an unnecessary process within normal mixing and normalising to 0db (if that’s what you did) is a bad idea as it leaves no additional headroom in plugins.

Not too sure what is going on with guitar rig but in the first instance try dropping the clip level (by pulling down the volume handle on the event by around 6db and see if the problem still occurs.

Also look at the meters in guitar rig rather than the cubase meters and use the input output levels to make sure you’re nowhere near clipping in the plug.

Hi,

+1 to what Grim said.

Plus: Do you HEAR any clipping?

Cheers, Ernst

I don’t know if Guitar Rig is VST3 ?
If it is it is check if You have ticked the :
Preferences/VST/Plug-Ins/suspend VST3 plug-in processing when no audio signals are received
Try removing that if it is set to ON.
Steinbergs own Rotary had this issue not so long ago, but this could be something completely different.

GuitarRig is not VST3.

more info on this. it turns out that putting a fade on the soundclip has no effect on what gets sent to the plugin !

in order to test this, i created a small project w/just one track and a 2-bar audio clip. i slip-edited the beginning of the clip so the fade was very obviously noticeable [about half a measure]. when i play it, the sound sent out the the mains slams on as if there were no fade at all. when i bypass the plugin, i can hear the fade clearly. in other words, it seems like event edits are actually evaluated last in the signal chain, rather than first.

this isn’t at all what i expected, but is that the way things are meant to work in cubase ? if so, it’s certainly different to the way other daws i tried out do their thing. maybe there’s a preferences setting somewhere i should change ?

thanks for the help so far !

this isn’t at all what i expected, but is that the way things are meant to work in cubase ? if so, it’s certainly different to the way other daws i tried out do their thing.

Doesn’t work that way in Cubase. Works exactly as you would expect and like other DAWS.

well then either i’m doing something really wrong, or there’s a bug. don’t rule out the former ; i have been pretty diligent about trying to figure this out [preferences settings, manual, ta-ra ta-ra], but i am a new user, so it’s definitely possible i’m doing something clueless.

i created a project [here attached] to test out what’s happening on my machine. when i have the plugin enabled, sound comes out the mains at full volume right where the clip starts, even though i’ve got a fade-in for several beats. when i disable the plugin, the sound gradually fades in.

i’m wondering if there’s something i should set [a preference or something] that says ‘don’t queue up samples for vst’ or something like that, but if there is, i can’t find it.
edit-bug.zip (387 KB)

And what happens if you put the plugin post fader ?

I downloaded your cpr bu as I don’t have guitar rig it doesn’t tell me much…your audio at clip level is ok but that doesn’t rule out clipping inside the plug. I substituted another amp sim and it works exactly as expected.

So did you confirm that you are not clipping the input inside of the plugin?
Does it do it on another guitar rig preset?
Can you reproduce with any other plugin?

It’s also just occurred to me to check your spec and I see no audio interface listed…are you running built in sound? On what driver?

Hi

I tried your test project.

i created a project [here attached] to test out what’s happening on my machine. when i have the plugin enabled, sound comes out the mains at full volume right where the clip starts, even though i’ve got a fade-in for several beats. when i disable the plugin, the sound gradually fades in.

The reason you don’t hear any fade in is because you are using an amp with high gain settings. Those amps tend to kill all dynamics and make everything sound rather flat (in terms of volume)
Even real amps do this. Maybe not to such extent, but they do.

If you pick a clean amp (like Jazz amp or Twang), you should hear them respond to your fade in better.
(Or just turn off Skreamer and set the amp gain to low instead of high)

So you are not doing anything wrong. That’s just how it works

confirmed.

thanks for all the help, guys. i ended up changing the gain stage order, trying different plugins, and also swapped out components in guitar rig itself. misohoza was right on the money – the component called ‘skreamer’ was causing this. i’m still not sure how, exactly, i guess it just automatically cranks up even the tiniest level to full crack regardless of what it gets. this is actually kind of annoying, in the real project i’m working on there are dozens of places i’ll have to go back and add automation at the beginning of each soundclip to get rid of the clipping caused by this feature. i think i’ll probably just use a different amp sim.