I was invited to speak here!
Let me beging by saying that CyanJaguar asked me how I got my mix to sound so punchy. I don't know if I'm one of those "professionals" he referred to but he seemed to like my mix. Let me further qualify my comments by saying that my clients fired me. So if thats what you mean by punch, I don't want it
About my mix. The first thing I can say is that all the drum sounds were created by a drum machine so there were no phase issues to deal with. When I brought up the kick, the first thing I listened to, I thought that it was a bit weak no real bottom. I opened up a reverb and dialed that in. 43ms of predelay 2.23s of reverb. bass multiply by 1.4. I also set the hf cut off at 7.5k. Although this made the kicksound bigger by placing it in a room, it still lacked bottom. I took a sample from a Rage Against the Machine song and locked that to every kick hit. Protools has a plug-in that will make a new track of the sampled sound while leaving the original track intact. By blending the two tracks I got the kick sound.
The bass sound was a keyboard bass track. It to sounded rather flat so I added a bass synthesizer to add all the sub harmonic crap that you feel in club music.
To get the track moving I put
the waves C4 Multiband Parametric Processor across the stereo buss. I added 7db og gain from 180hz down. By soloing that section it sounded like I was in the bathroom at a rave. Range -8.0, Threshold -28.9, Attack 34.99, Release 40.27. The low mids I rolled off from 180hz to 648hz by -4.8db. Range -8.0, Threshold -19.2, Attack 16.03, Release 25.00. By lowering these freq I found that the bass was more defined. Having this range of freq. soloed it now sounded like I was in the line outside the club waiting to get in. A bit more defined than the bathroom sound. the next group of freq, 648hz to 5456hz. I wanted to boost these to get a clearer sound. This is also where the "punch" is comming from. 6.0db of gain. Range -8.0, Threshold -30.1, Attack 4.99, Release 9.98. The attack and release are set very fast. Anything that hits the compressoris immediatly squashed then just as fast released. By sosing just this freq range it sounds just like when your friends call from the club at 1:45am boasting about how drunk they are
. Finally, from 5456 up, I boosted the gain 10.1db Range -8.0, Threshold -35.3, Attack 2.0, Release 5.0. This sounds like sitting next to someone at the library when they have headphones on.
I think that many factors play into the whole "punch" thing. CJ was right with predelay, compression, and eq. One also needs to be very aware when it comes to phase. That will suck all the bottom out of the mix. It can have all the attack in the world but with no low end, you've got no punch.
If you want to check out my post:
https://homerecording.com/bbs//showthread.php?threadid=26411
I, like always, am very thankful for any input people give.
