Clipper

6/5 Kilohearts released its Clipper as a free part of the Kilohearts Essentials bundle in 2025, and it has become my go-to for drums and percussion. It clips per sample with a Knee control that rounds the corner from hard to soft, so you can tighten transients without the harsh edge a pure hard clip can leave on a snare or a hi-hat. The controls are deliberately minimal, with the Threshold set on the waveform plus In Gain, Knee, and Out Gain.

CPU use is very low, so it is easy to drop on every drum channel. The cool part is that the same Clipper also works as a Kilohearts Snapin. Load it inside Multipass, and you can split the signal into bands and clip each one separately, which turns it into a free multiband clipper. Multipass itself is a paid host, so that trick costs extra, but the standalone plugin is free in any DAW. The obvious limitation is oversampling, or rather, the lack of it.

There is no oversampling control at all, so on bright, aggressive material, you can hear the aliasing that Free Clip 2 or KClip Zero would clean up. You also need a free Kilohearts account to download it. Best for: drum bus and percussion clipping where speed and low CPU matter more than mastering-grade polish. Hard + knee · Windows (VST, VST3, AAX), macOS (AU, AAX) · no oversampling · also runs as a Kilohearts Snapin.

Verdict: the drum clipper I reach for, with a hidden multiband trick if you own Multipass.