1 · What DeltaClip is
DeltaClip is a clipper — it shaves peaks against a ceiling to trade headroom for loudness — built on the family idea: you should see what a processor does, not imagine it. The clip curve is drawn live with your own signal tracing it, the gain reduction is drawn per sample on the waveform, and the monitoring section lets you hear exactly what was removed, level-matched if you want.
It clips in Stereo, L/R or M/S, with an independent set of controls per channel, and adds two optional stages around the clip itself: DENSITY (loudness and warmth before the ceiling) and SMOOTH / WARMTH (an adaptive conditioner after it).
2 · Install & formats
DeltaClip is currently built as VST3; AU and CLAP are on the
roadmap. The installer places the VST3 in
C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3 — rescan plugins in your DAW.
Pre-release builds are unsigned — Windows SmartScreen will show "Windows protected your PC" → More info → Run anyway. Expected for a pre-release build.
3 · Quick start
- Insert DeltaClip on a track — drums, a bus, or the master.
- Play the track and watch the SHAPE view: your signal traces the transfer curve. Nothing bends yet — the signal is below the ceiling.
- Raise DRIVE until the trace climbs into the bend. That bend is the clipping — the SIG view shows the same thing on the waveform as a per-sample shave.
- Pick a character (the five curve buttons) and shape its corner with KNEE.
- Switch the monitor to Δ to hear what’s being removed. If the Δ is all transient click, you’re clean; if the body of the sound is in there, back off.
- Enable AUTO level-match and A/B against bypass at equal loudness.
4 · Signal flow
The chain, in order:
IN → DRIVE → DENSITY → CLIP (character · knee · ceiling) → SMOOTH / WARMTH → MIX → OUTPUT
- DRIVE pushes the signal into the ceiling — the main "how much clipping" control.
- DENSITY adds peak-preserving loudness and warmth before the clip (§8).
- CLIP is the transfer curve itself: the selected character, its KNEE morph, and the CEILING (adjustable down to −36 dB).
- SMOOTH / WARMTH condition the clipped signal adaptively (§9).
- MIX blends the processed signal against the dry — parallel clipping on a dial.
- OUTPUT is the final trim.
In L/R and M/S modes, DRIVE, CEILING, KNEE and MIX exist per channel — each channel is a complete clipper (§7).
5 · The views — SIG & SHAPE
SIG — the signal, with the shave on it
SIG scrolls the waveform with the clipper’s work drawn directly on it: the level that came in, and the exact per-sample gain reduction that was taken off. It’s the truthful record — measured at the samples, not reconstructed from meters — so a hit that only lost its top 0.5 dB looks exactly that mild, and a crushed one looks crushed.
SHAPE — the transfer curve, live
SHAPE plots dry level in (horizontal) against wet level out (vertical), and your signal traces it as a phosphor — bright where the samples currently live, fading where they just were. Below the knee the trace rides the straight unity diagonal; inside the bend it curves; at the ceiling it flattens. In Stereo you get one big plot; in L/R and M/S two plots sit side by side in the channel colours, so you can see, for example, the Side clipping while the Mid passes clean.
6 · Characters & KNEE
The five clip characters are ordered by corner radius — how abruptly the curve turns at the ceiling. The curve icons are the buttons: the shape you click is the shape you get.
| Character | Curve |
|---|---|
| Hard | A razor corner — straight to the ceiling, then flat. The cleanest loudness per dB of drive; the most edge on transients. |
| Firm | A slight round-over — still tight, a little kinder. |
| Soft | A wider bend with a gentle asymmetry — the clip starts blending into saturation. |
| Gentle | The roundest knee — a wide, early curve for colour and density with the least edge. |
| Fold | The wildcard: clean up to the ceiling, then the overshoot folds back down instead of flattening — a richer, distinctive harmonic set that never exceeds the ceiling. |
KNEE morphs the corner of the character you’re on — it doesn’t switch curves, it reshapes the current one, from tighter to rounder. Watch the SHAPE view while you drag it: the corner literally changes under the phosphor. Character picks the family; KNEE dials the corner. Like the rest of the clip controls, KNEE is per channel in L/R and M/S modes.
7 · Channels
DeltaClip clips in three domains — Stereo, L/R, M/S — and every channel keeps its own complete bank: DRIVE · CEILING · KNEE · MIX.
The two-stage selector
The channel selector works in two stages: first pick the domain (Stereo, L/R or M/S), then pick which channel you’re editing. The control bank always shows the selected channel’s values, and the SHAPE plots are drawn in the channel colours (green = Left, amber = Right, teal = Mid, magenta = Side).
- LINK — holds the two channels of a domain in step: move one control and its partner follows. Useful for keeping L/R symmetric while you still watch them separately.
- Copy — one click copies the whole bank from one channel to the other. Dial in one side, carry it across, then diverge only where you mean to.
- Solo = audition — soloing a channel lets you listen to it in isolation while you set its clip. It’s a monitoring aid; the processing itself doesn’t change.
8 · DENSITY
DENSITY sits before the clip: peak-preserving upward loudness plus warmth. It raises the body of the signal without raising the peaks — so transients survive, and the extra level turns into extra clipping only where you asked for it.
Its voicing is deliberately restrained at the top: the top octave returns to unity, so pushing DENSITY never brightens the air. What you get is weight and density, not a sheen.
9 · SMOOTH & WARMTH
SMOOTH and WARMTH are a post-clip conditioner — and they are adaptive: they track how much clipping is actually happening, moment to moment.
- When the signal is below the ceiling and nothing clips, the conditioner does nothing — clean signal passes untouched.
- The harder you clip, the more SMOOTH tames the harshness the clip added.
- The harder you clip, the more WARMTH restores the low-mid body a hard clip thins out.
Because both track the clip amount, you can leave them set and they only work when there’s work to do — they are not a static EQ or a fixed smoothing filter.
10 · Oversampling & reconstruction
Clipping creates harmonics, and harmonics above Nyquist fold back down as aliasing. Oversampling runs the clip at a higher internal rate — selectable up to 16× — so those harmonics land where they can be filtered away instead of folding into the audible band.
The downsampling filter comes in three reconstruction modes:
| Mode | What it is |
|---|---|
| NAT | Minimum-phase reconstruction — the lowest latency of the three; the natural choice while tracking. |
| LIN | Linear-phase reconstruction — phase-neutral, at the cost of latency. |
| MSTR | A long linear-phase "memory" reconstruction — the longest filter, for an organic transfer. Intended where quality outranks latency (mastering-style use). |
Latency: oversampling and the linear-phase modes add latency, which DeltaClip reports to the host so the DAW compensates. LIN adds more than NAT, and MSTR the most. If timing while performing matters, use NAT or lower oversampling.
11 · Monitoring
| Source | What you hear |
|---|---|
| WET | The clipped output (default). |
| Δ | What the clip removed — input minus output. Transient edges clicking by = a clean clip; the tone of the sound in the Δ = you’re eating into the body. |
| Δ matched | The same removal, level-matched — judge its tone at equal loudness instead of being distracted by how quiet it is. |
| DRY | The untouched input. |
- A/B — two full settings snapshots. Set up two ideas and flip between them.
- MONO — collapse L/R to check mono compatibility.
- AUTO — level-matches the wet output to the dry signal’s loudness, so bypassing compares the clipping, not the volume jump.
- BYP — true bypass, for exactly that comparison.
12 · Metering
The loudness rail
- Loudness bars with peak-hold caps — channel-aware: the rail can follow the channel you’re editing, so in M/S mode you meter the Mid while you clip the Mid.
- An optional dry mirror shows the pre-clip level alongside, for a direct before/after read.
GR rails
- Per-channel gain-reduction rails show how much the clip is currently shaving, per channel — the at-a-glance companion to the per-sample shave in SIG.
Readouts
- TRUE PK — the true-peak (inter-sample) level, held at its maximum until you reset it. A held number you can act on, not a flicker you have to catch.
- PLR — peak-to-loudness ratio, averaged over time: a steady read on how much crest the material has left after clipping.
The True-Peak Lens
Click the TRUE PK readout to open the lens: a zoomed view of the moment the overshoot happened — the real samples sitting under the ceiling, and the reconstructed waveform arcing past 0 dBFS between them. This is where inter-sample peaks live: every sample is legal, and the analog waveform between them still overshoots. Seeing one makes the TRUE PK number concrete — and shows you why a ceiling a few tenths of a dB below zero is standard practice.
13 · Band focus
LOW CUT and HIGH CUT place the clipper on a band: only the band between the filters is driven into the clip — everything outside it passes through clean and is recombined at the output.
Typical uses: clip only the low end so the kick stops eating headroom while the cymbals stay untouched, or keep sub energy out of the clipper entirely so it doesn’t dominate the shave.
14 · FREEZE
FREEZE captures a short grain loop of the incoming audio and keeps playing it while you work. Instead of waiting for the chorus to come around again, freeze its loudest bar and tune the character, knee and drive on that exact material — the same hit, over and over, until it sits right. Unfreeze and playback continues live.
15 · The view toggle & help mode
- View toggle — switches the main canvas between SIG and SHAPE. Both read the same processing; they are two pictures of the same clip.
- ? (help mode) — tooltips are shown only while ? is on. Toggle it on and hover any control for a short explanation card; toggle it off and the interface stays quiet. Nothing pops up uninvited.
16 · DeltaWall
Like every Delta plugin, DeltaClip reports to DeltaWall — the free standalone app that shows one live tile per Delta plugin in your project, with no routing or setup. Your clippers appear on the session wall next to your meters and EQs, so you can see which tracks are being shaved, from one window. DeltaWall is free with any Delta license.
DeltaClip — clipping you can see. 🖤