JB’s “Hot Crunch” or How To Pimp Your IDs

Today I will show you a short trick by benztown’s Classic Hits and UrbanAC imaging director, Jan Brückner. This hot Pro Tools tip adds a nice effect to vocals. The processing works in a fast, but efficient way and crunches up your IDs or Voice Over. Thats why he calls it „The Hot Crunch“!

Let me show you the basic steps. At first, import the ID and duplicates it on another audio track. To make sure, that unwanted rumbles or useless low end frequencies foul the signal, set a LoCut at 400Hz on the original file and a 800Hz LoCut on the duplicated file. Then, render ‘SansAmp‘, which ships with Pro Tools, into the duplicated file. As an addition, use ‘SCI-Fi’, to increase the the value of crunchyness and wanted distortion. By balancing the original and processed file, you can simply vary the value of distortion. The settings you can see in the screenshot above, are a good value to start from.

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Beside increased presence, this kind of processing enhances the quality of even muddy IDs. As you can hear, the original audio is not the best, but after processing this is no longer a problem. So give it a try in your next production!