Low End/Soft Clipping Conflict

Hi everyone. Sorry to bother you on a Sunday evening with such nerdy crap but I’d really appreciate some help with the below issue.

I’ve a got a bass part that I want to add more sub to.

The bass is running into a soft clipper. My thinking behind this is as follows:

I’m using the soft clipper to round off the loudest transients of each note, thus making my peak level lower. Soft clipping also makes the RMS lower but it reduces the peak level more than it reduces the RMS, thus bringing the peak level and RMS level close together. That allows you to have a louder perceived volume with quieter peaks. This worked. I managed to get my RMS louder by 1.6 dB while reducing my peak level by 0.6 dB. I was thinking that this will get me an audibly louder sound but will take the pressure off the compressors and limiters in the mastering stage because the peak level has been reduced.

As I said, I want to now add more sub to this bass. My soft clipper is placed after all of my EQ plugins because that seemed the most sensible way to me.

I tried to add around 70 Hz shelf using an SSL emulation but even when I boost by 15 dB I don’t notice a big change in the low end, certainly not what you would expect after boosting 15 dB anyway.

I’m trying to get a crystal clear understanding of what’s going on here. Here’s what I think. Correct me if I’m wrong.

• * The “clip ceiling” control on the clipper is what does the rounding off of the transients, which is what causes the peak level and RMS level to go down. If I had the clipper set how I want it (ie it’s already doing some clipping) and then boosted the amplitude before the clipper (like adding 70 Hz), then the level going into the clipper will increase and thus the clipper will be doing even more clipping than before. Right?

• * If I add about 7 dB of 70 Hz and back off the “clip ceiling” control (ie reduce the amount of clipping) then I start to hear the 70 Hz I just added. That’s the low end problem solved. This is because I have reduced the amount of clipping in proportion to the amount of 70 Hz gain I added (or roughly in proportion anyway). Right?

• * However, the problem here is that I like the midrange growl that the clipper was adding originally. That growl was there because the clipper was doing more clipping before I backed off the clip ceiling control to let in the low end I added.
  

• * It seems to me that there should be a way to achieve the low end presence I want but also clip the sound enough to get that growl I had originally. I want to find out if there is a way to achieve this just by using the controls on the plugin: Input Gain, Clip Ceiling, Output Gain. Is this possible?

I thought that I could achieve this by adding the 70 Hz boost and then turning down the input gain of the clipper to compensate for the gain I added at 70 Hz but that didn't work.

• * If it is not possible to have both the midrange growl and the low end presence simultaneously, could someone explain why that is the case?

In the video I used two tracks just for demonstration purposes. BASS is the original track where you can hear what the tone was like prior to adding the 70 Hz and adjusting the clip ceiling. BASS TEST 2 is the same as BASS but with the added 70 Hz and the clip ceiling adjusted.

Thanks

If it's of any relevance, here are my peak ad RMS readings before and after I applied the soft clipping. The after reading is also before I added the 70 Hz.

BEFORE CLIPPING

Peak -9.8

RMS -13.4

AFTER CLIPPING (Clip Ceiling at -11, Input gain at -2.1 dB, output gain at 8.4 dB)

Peak -10.4

RMS -11.8