Cheap Haircut

Peak Clipper.
A Little Off the Top.

$9 Perpetual License
3 Platforms
VST3 + AU on macOS
Cheap Haircut VST3 - Peak Clipper

Cheap Haircut

Perpetual license - pay once, own it forever.

$9 Buy Now

Secure checkout · Instant license delivery

Try the free demo

Some Peaks Contribute to the Sound. Others Just Eat Headroom.

Others just eat headroom and demand their own dressing room. Cheap Haircut deals with the second kind.

Turn up Input, bring down Threshold, and the samples that cross the clipping boundary get cut back. That can make a snare feel more immediate, give a drum bus some bite, or let a mix sit louder before the final limiter has to work so hard. You'll hear the attitude when you push it. That's the point.

VU meter

A Little Off the Top. A Lot More Room to Move.

Watch the live clip scope - clean signal in grey, actual output in fluorescent green. Wherever grey pokes out past green, that's the part that got trimmed. Hit Delta to hear only what got shaved away.

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No account required - we send the link to your email. Silences briefly every 30 seconds in demo mode.

Hard Cut. Soft Landing.

Choose the Cut That Suits the Track.

Hard Clip draws a sharp line: anything beyond the ceiling gets stopped there. It's the setting for a firmer edge and more obvious harmonic grit. Soft Clip bends the signal as it approaches the ceiling, rounding the transition while leaving quieter material outside the clipping region completely alone.

  • Input - ±12dB, drives the signal into the clip stage
  • Threshold - 0 to -24dB, sets exactly where the haircut starts
  • Hard/Soft Clip - Sharp ceiling or a rounded, saturation-like transition
Cheap Haircut Input, Threshold and Type controls
Cheap Haircut live clip scope

See the Damage. Hear the Evidence.

Keep Some of the Mess.

Mix blends the processed signal with the clean signal from 0 to 100% - clip a snare aggressively and bring back some of its original peak shape, or add a touch of density to a full mix without committing to the entire cut. The live clip scope shows the original waveform in grey and the output in fluorescent green, so you always know exactly what's getting cut.

  • Mix - Parallel blend of clipped signal against the clean original
  • Oversample - Real anti-aliasing, keeps clipping's harshest harmonics out of the cut
  • Delta - Audition only the content that got shaved away
∞

Perpetual License

One-time purchase. Yours forever. No subscription, no renewal.

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3 Activations

Install on up to three machines simultaneously. Need to move a license? Email us.

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Secure & Private

Encrypted activation over HTTPS. No telemetry. No data leaves your machine during use.

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Direct Support

You email us, we answer. No ticket queues, no bots, no knowledge base rabbit holes.

System Requirements

Format

VST3 (64-bit) - Windows, macOS, Linux
AU (64-bit) - macOS only

Platform

Windows 10 / 11
macOS 11 Big Sur or later (Apple Silicon + Intel)
Linux - Ubuntu 22.04+ or equivalent

DAW Compatibility

Any VST3-compatible host: Reaper, Cubase, Studio One, Ableton Live, FL Studio, Bitwig Studio, Nuendo, and more

AU (macOS): Logic Pro, GarageBand, MainStage

Latency

Plugin buffer only, plus a few samples of oversampler latency when Oversample is engaged - reported to the host

License

Perpetual, single user
3 simultaneous activations
Need to move a license? Email us

SHA-256 (mmedia-cheap-haircut-v1.0.0.zip): 00a774e5df8283016ebf4cf9acc14deab163902e98f6773880ec71f1a60f104b

Linux System Requirements

Tested on Ubuntu 22.04/24.04, Debian 12, Fedora 40. Requires one system library for license verification:

sudo apt install libsodium23        # Ubuntu / Debian
sudo dnf install libsodium          # Fedora / RHEL
sudo pacman -S libsodium            # Arch

VST3 only. Confirmed working in REAPER and Bitwig.

Version History

v1.0.0 Sep 2026 Initial release.

Cheap Haircut

Perpetual license - pay once, own it forever.

$9 Buy Now

Secure checkout · Instant license delivery

Try the free demo
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