Bass has clipped

Rob,

I try to keep all my tracks out of the red.... but on occasion, they do hit the red and clip. Unless it is a hard clip, taking the top out of the meter.....it is not noticeable to me audibly. I recently recorded a vox track that when I bounced it..... man it was clipping and cracking...... but that was a rare thing, and actually the first time I ever had that result.

Doing a bass line at the moment, and on playing it back I can see it's clipped in one or two places. I'm going to compress the bass when it's all finished, so will that allow me to keep this bass track, rather than re-record it? Will a bass clip be noticed if it's compressed?

Compressing won't help, unfortunately. That clipping happened when you were recording, in the analog portion of your A/D converter. You're stuck with it.

The audibility of clipping depends on how clipped it is and how many cycles it was clipped. If it's just a couple of cycles that got flat-topped, I wouldn't worry about it. Even if it's more than that, it's still likely it won't be noticeable because it was analog clipping, not digital. IOW, it might be audible but not objectionable.

But if it's real noticeable, and if it's not possible to re-track the bass part, you could always do some clever editing, e.g. find the same note elsewhere in the track and paste a copy of it over the clipped note.

Unless it is super hot and occurred at a time when the bass is the focal part of the song, my guess is that you probably won't really hear it in the mix.  

Everybody covered the answer pretty well above, nothing I could add 'cept if you can't hear it, it ain't there.

So, where ya been hiding? Haven't seen nor heard from you for a while. Hope the family is doing well, still employed and all that stuff.

Is something new coming in the near future? Sure would like to hear some of them blues again.

Later
Albert