Once you’ve internalized The Anatomy of Audio Dynamics and start thinking of the dynamic range in terms of punch, body and floor regions, Dynamic Grading provides you with a whole new menu of creative options. Let’s learn how to choose.
Tailored Processing For Punch, Body and Floor
By either using the target markers or the ratio knobs in Dynamic Grading, you can shape the punch, body and floor ranges in a lot of interesting ways. For each range you can individually choose to compress, expand or leave it unchanged. As the three ranges contain distinct audio features, you can achieve vastly different outcomes by shaping either.
Punch
As outlined in The Anatomy of Audio Dynamics, the punch range contains note onsets, transients, attacks. When attacks stick out too much and you want to tame them, you can compress the punch. This will reduce the impact and free up some headroom. Punch compression also comes in handy when you want to push a signal more towards the background.
On the opposite, you can also expand the punch range when you want to enhance attacks and onsets. This will move a signal more to the front and “in the face” of the listener.
Body
We learned that the body features the most important musical information. When you compress the body, you can increase its presence in a busy mix. In that case, sustains can become stronger, softer notes and ghost notes increase in level and have a better chance to cut through other instruments in the mix. Compression of the body ranges is essential if you want to create a dense and loud mix. Another great use case for body compression is to make a vocal recording more intimate by bringing up breathing and other low-level noises.
By expanding the body range, you can create more space for other instruments. This may also lead to an enhanced feel of “groove”, as instruments become more dynamic. This works especially well for seasoning drum and percussion tracks.
Floor
The “space between the notes” is another range that carries important audio features we want to control when mixing a song. Some of them are wanted, some we’d rather get rid of. In deciding what to keep and what to eliminate lies a lot of creative expression.
The floor range is home to low-level sound such as reverberation, echoes or noises. If you compress here, you can exaggerate roominess and thus create a more immersive feeling. It’s also great to create weird artistic effects.
Often it is a very good idea to try expanding the floor range, which cleans up the track by reducing reverberation, noise or other unwanted elements. This is an especially valuable technique if you’re dealing with recordings made in less than ideal rooms.
Similarly, when you started by compressing the body range – which you will and should often do – you’ve linearly brought up the floor range, including all the low level details. In that case it’s often useful to bring some of it back down by expanding the floor.
A Handy Cheat Sheet
To conclude the above, here’s a handy cheat sheet, as an overview on the different ranges, what you typically find there, and what you can achieve by shaping them.
Dynamic Grading makes it easy to quickly identify the different ranges in a given audio track and modify them all at once to create the effects outlined above. Turning a bland, thin and roomy instrument recording into a punchy, fat and dry track that really ties your mix together is a matter of seconds.
