It will help, though! Commercial products will use 4-16x oversampling internally. Most useful distortions will have infinite harmonic series, but the hard clipper is certainly one of the worst because of the high amount of total harmonic distortion (THD). There's a lot of energy in those upper harmonics.
The classic soft clipper is something like
tanh(kx) / tanh(k)
which gives you a normalized output. It's not that expensive in the grand scheme of things, and is certainly cheaper than oversampling.
If you want something even more valve-like, a bit of DC bias to the signal before tanh will give you even order harmonic distortion, which sounds warmer (it beefs up the signal and puts energy into the octave harmonics, where as hard clippers usually only shove energy into the odd harmonics which sound harsher).
The classic soft clipper is something like
which gives you a normalized output. It's not that expensive in the grand scheme of things, and is certainly cheaper than oversampling.If you want something even more valve-like, a bit of DC bias to the signal before tanh will give you even order harmonic distortion, which sounds warmer (it beefs up the signal and puts energy into the octave harmonics, where as hard clippers usually only shove energy into the odd harmonics which sound harsher).