Being a multimode exciter, Presence analyses the incoming signal and dynamically adds new content to the frequency spectrum, that wasn’t there before. Thus, whenever you think that an instrument or even a whole mix lacks that little bit of strength, weight, or substance this plugin might be just what you’re looking for! In this tutorial we’re going to use Presence to give a rather thin and plain synth sound more depth, warmth, and body.
Here’s the song we’re going to work with today. Pay attention to the main synth sound, the one followed by the lovely ducking delay:
Excite Factor
Using Presence isn’t particularly difficult, as there are only a handful of controls available. First up is the drop-down menu at the top of the interface: here you can choose the overall algorithm of the plugin. For our synth sound rather consists of individual steps than of sustained notes we stick with the default option, which should be ‘Sustain’. In this mode the newly created frequency content is slightly ducked by the original signal.
Before we move on to the actual exciter section we turn the high pass filter right below the (input) GAIN knob to the far right. After all, we’re working on a lead-type of sound (and not a synth bass, e. g.), so we don’t need the very low frequencies below 100Hz anyway. For the same reason we turn the LOW/FREQ-control all the way up to 600Hz, and only add a small amount of ‘excitement’ with the ACTION-knob. However, we want to really emphasize the upper midrange and top end. Therefore, we set both HIGH/FREQ and ACTION to maximum. Finally, we round things off by setting the Tilt-filter-control (below the VOLUME-knob) to two o’clock.
The interface of the plugin should now look something like this:
The Result
And here’s our example track with Presence applied to the lead synth:
You can download the preset for Presence here: warm-synth-sounds-with-presence_preset-fxp