Five years ago, before Schwabe Digital even existed, I was sitting in my bedroom studio in West Philadelphia with some sketches in a notebook and a few transfer curves plotted out in Excel. At some point, I just Googled, “How do you build a plugin?”
I eventually stumbled onto a brilliant developer, and a few months later I was testing prototypes on records I was mixing and mastering.
It was the middle of the pandemic. Much of the world had slowed down, but somehow the studio just kept moving faster. A lot of musicians were at home making records, and I was locked in the studio finishing them. I worked on more than 700 projects that year and received my first Grammy nomination for mixing Baauer’s Planet’s Mad, which was nominated for Best Dance / Electronic Album. I was squeezing everything I could out of every day back then.
The busier I got making records, the more obvious it became that I needed a faster way to get the sound of my analog chain in my workflow. I was constantly printing mixes and stems through my chain in real-time and wondering if there was a faster way.
Eventually that question turned into an idea.
At the time, I was just doing it for myself and some friends. I was not trying to start a software company. I was just trying to build something that would help me make better records.
I got so lost in the process that before I knew it, two years went by and that little idea had become Gold Clip.
Since then, the work never really stopped. Gold Clip eventually became Gold Clip Pack. Orange Clip evolved into Orange Clip 3. Less than a year after releasing HiFAL, we are already preparing HiFAL 2.
You can see a pattern here. Every time I think I’m finished, I end up pulling on another thread.
Looking back, what stands out most is not the products or the updates. It is the process. Refining them, rebuilding them, turning them into tools that people never feel the need to replace.
That process produced hundreds of versions of every plugin, and also left a lot of abandoned plugin ideas sitting dormant in my Schwabe Digital plugin folder.
In fact, I built and abandoned at least six plugins because I did not think they were good enough to release. Probably not the smartest business decision, but I was never really thinking about it like a business. I was thinking about the tools I needed to mix and master records.
If I would not use it, I would not release it.
What started as a single idea eventually became something much bigger. Over the past five years, I found myself surrounded by talented mathematicians, developers, designers, product managers, and researchers who are pushing ideas far beyond where I could go on my own.
Today, I am still sitting in that same bedroom studio in West Philadelphia. The room has not changed much, but the ideas have. Some of those ideas are finally starting to take shape, and they remind me a lot of how Gold Clip felt in the beginning.
That same feeling that there might be something really interesting on the other side of the next experiment.
Coming soon.
Have questions? Just hit reply, and we’ll get back to you. You can also tag us on instagram—we’re always happy to connect!
Be well,
Ryan Schwabe
Grammy-nominated and multi-platinum mixing & mastering engineer
Founder of Schwabe Digital
No, you don't need true peak limiting.
Here is the alternative:
Do not slam everything against 0.0 dBFS → leave a tiny amount of headroom → use that headroom to rebuild transient detail → put a safety limiter at the end.
Curious how that can work? Read on.
Resonant suppressors promise smoothness and control. They identify frequency spikes and automatically notch them down with dozens, or sometimes hundreds of narrow, minimum-phase EQ filters. It does its job, but it comes at a cost.
HiFAL is a tool designed to control the tonality, shape, and balance of the high frequencies in your mix.
When deciding where to place HiFAL on the mix bus, it helps to think about how loudness affects balance. As a master gets louder, the mix often feels brighter. This tonal change is dynamic, driven by how loudness processing reshapes high frequency energy in relation to the low end.
We’ve all had a mix that feels great in the studio, but the top end turns brittle the second you play it on a stereo, laptop, earbuds or a phone. The question has always been the same: how do you keep the highs exciting without letting them cross into harshness? Even with today’s most advanced spectral tools, one of the smartest solutions comes from decades ago in a processor few engineers talk about: the acceleration limiter.
Spinning thrift-store vinyl as a kid, I learned the sound of records before I ever understood what compressors or EQs were. Listening beyond the surface noise and crackle, I heard music that felt balanced. The highs never turned harsh, no matter how bright the record was. I could turn it up, lean in, and still feel comfortable.
Grammy-winning mixer Craig Bauer shot a new video showing how he uses Orange Clip 3 on an EDM mix.
Instead of just running it on the mix bus, Craig puts Orange Clip 3 to work in multi-band mode on the kick, snare, and hi-hat.
Craig calls Orange Clip 3 a “non-negotiable” tool in his mixes.
You know that endless debate about DAW “sound”? The one where half the internet swears Logic sounds different from Pro Tools, while the other half rolls their eyes and screams “32-bit floating point math is math!”
Plot twist: They are both right. And both wrong.
I sometimes get a lead single that sounds drastically different from the rest of the project. Maybe it was mixed by a different engineer, or just labored over with more detail and intensity. And sometimes, I’m not even told the song is part of a full-length project. Then, weeks later, the rest of the EP or LP shows up—and it’s tough to match tone or loudness because the new material feels completely different.
In our recent emails, we explored how to simplify equalization by working with octaves. If you missed them, you can check out the full breakdown here, where I go through all 10 octaves and share practical tips for approaching each one. But EQ decisions aren’t just technical—they’re shaped by how we hear sound, how listeners interpret it, and our own personal preferences. Balancing these three factors is key to crafting a well-rounded mix, yet it’s often one of the biggest challenges in mixing and mastering.
You have heard me say this before, but as engineers, we tend to overcomplicate things. Occam's Razor suggests that the simplest solution is always the most effective.
This is the first of a three-part email series designed to simplify your approach to EQ and help you make better mixing decisions.
We measure sound frequencies on a logarithmic scale in Hertz (Hz), or cycles per second. While essential for describing audio, this unit can feel abstract and disconnected to how we think about and create music. For example, a frequency of 100 Hz means a sound wave vibrates or oscillates for one full cycle at 100 times per second.
Last time, we explored how thinking in octaves can simplify your EQ process, making it feel more musical and intuitive. Today, we’ll take that concept further by dividing the 10 octaves into 5 key frequency bands—low, low-mids, mids, high-mids, and highs—and discussing how each band shapes our perception of sound. This week, we’ll focus on the first three bands and cover the remaining ones next week. Conveniently, each of the 5 bands spans roughly two octaves. Let’s explore them.
Last week, we explored the lows and mids—the fundamental frequencies that give your mix its weight, warmth, and power. Today, we'll focus on the high-mids and highs, where brightness and articulation live. These frequencies are crucial for bringing excitement and clarity to your mix, but they require precise placement to avoid harshness. Let's talk about how to craft a top end that's clear, balanced, and musical.
I am a minimalist at heart. I want processors that are simple, direct, and powerful. As engineers, we can quickly overcomplicate things.
A while back, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by the legendary author Bobby Owsinski on his podcast,
Back in March of 2024, I did an interview with Devvon Terrell, L.Dre, and Courtney Taylor of the Help Me Devvon / Audio Nerds podcast…
A few weeks back, my friend Ken Lewis asked me to make a video about how I use Gold Clip and Orange Clip for his Mixing Night Podcast. I decided to throw that video on my YouTube page and share it with you.
As a mastering engineer, I’m often handed mixes that are already limited or clipped. These loud, finalized mixes can be tricky to work with because there’s often very little headroom or transient detail left. What I do as a mastering engineer involves envelope or dynamic shaping just as much as balancing, sweetening, and preparing a mix for distribution.
It is coming up on a year since my Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical for mixing and mastering Baynk’s Adolescence. When it happened, I was attending the Audio Developers Conference in London on November 12th, 2022.
You never know whether a record you are working on is going to be a hit or not. I have tried to predict it and sometimes I was right, but most of the time I had no idea what was going to catch the attention of the world. Honestly, when you start working on a record that turns out to be a hit, it doesn’t feel very different than what you have done before.
Mixing and mastering records for a living means that you will be working long hours, and those hours often bleed into your personal life…
Shaping high frequencies is one of the more challenging aspects of mixing and mastering, especially when the changes are subtle. Small adjustments to high-frequency dynamics can have a significant impact on how we perceive the overall sound of a record.