PUNCH puts the drums up front and the low end in place. The starting settings for snare, bus, vocal and bass come written down, so you do not start from zero.
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Ableton Live 12 · Suite or Standard with Max for Live
The snare loses its crack. The bass moves but does not sit. The drum bus needs to get louder without getting smaller.
PUNCH is a fast compressor, FET style, with a harmonic stage and a mode that squeezes harder the harder you hit. The settings for each of those cases are right below, with the numbers. You type them in and adjust from there.
Settings, not presets. Type them in and move on.
Attack 0.1–0.5 ms · Release 100–200 ms · Ratio 4:1 · Knee 6 dB
Fast enough to flatten the stick, slow enough for the room to breathe again. Set the threshold until the needle rests near 4 dB on the hits. If the snare loses its crack, raise the attack 0.1 ms at a time until it comes back.
Ratio 4:1 · Attack 3–8 ms · Release 120 ms · Mix 60%
The slower attack lets the transient through, and the release catches the tail. MIX is what keeps it from turning into a wall: set the threshold for 6 to 8 dB of reduction, then bring MIX down until the kit moves again.
Knee 8–12 dB · Ratio 2:1 or 4:1 · Attack 3–10 ms · Release 200–400 ms
A wide knee starts the reduction before the threshold, not at it, so it levels the whole take instead of jumping on the loud words.
Ratio 8:1 · Attack 1 ms · Harmonics ODD · Drive 30–50%
The harmonic stage adds the content that makes a bassline exist on a phone speaker. ODD is the harder one; switch to EVEN if it gets brittle.
Every ratio holds one number. PIN works out how much to take from how far the signal went over the threshold, and the harder you hit, the harder it squeezes. It is the setting where it stops being compression and becomes a sound: drums flatten and then bloom, a room mic turns into texture.
On its own it is too much. Thirty to fifty percent of PIN in the MIX, under a dry drum kit, is the reason to own this device.
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Eight ratios, from 1:1 to infinity, plus PIN. Attack from 0.05 to 50 ms, release from 20 to 3000. Even and odd harmonics with drive, separate from the compression: you can leave the threshold at zero and use only the gain. Parallel MIX. Oversampling from 1x to 16x without changing CPU. Two panel finishes. Everything automatable.
On a phone, the panel shows in parts, top to bottom.
Capture with signal passing: a four-on-the-floor kick, GR −5.7 dB on the meter.
Latency of 50 samples in every mode, always, and Live compensates on its own. Even at 1x it is not zero, and it is said here. CEILING, the clipper from the same bench, has the same interface and the same 50 samples: swapping one for the other in the chain moves nothing in time.
What a great product, it's easy to use, intuitive, and makes coming up with chords, basslines, and melodies much faster. A really useful addition to my library.
I was looking for something like that! It works like magic!
An excellent, well thought out and made plugin.
Dope tool to get the low end right. Thanks!
Gracias por tan fantástica herramienta para LIVE.
oh? oh. ooohhhhhhhhhhh… yeeeeeesssss.
Public reviews from the Gumroad store, as written there. Reviews left without a name show as anonymous, like on the store. See them on the store.
I make Max for Live devices and I make my own records. I wrote PUNCH from scratch, in gen~, and checked the ratios and the knee against the maths, not against a memory of how a FET sounded. The tests run before every version ships.
Found a bug? Write me. It gets fixed and you get the fix for free, through the same download link.
No. It is 50 samples in every oversampling mode and at every sample rate, and Live compensates on its own. It is constant on purpose, so you can switch oversampling mid-session without anything moving in time.
Every ratio holds one number. PIN works out how much to take from how far the signal went over the threshold, so the harder you hit, the harder it squeezes, and it never settles on a single slope. It ignores the RATIO switch on purpose.
No, and you should keep using both. PUNCH adds oversampling up to 16x, which neither lets you choose, a harmonic stage separate from the compression, and PIN. The detector reads the input, not the output.
64-bit DSP, written in gen~. The oversampling is a real polyphase cascade, with alias rejection measured per mode, and the switch does not change CPU: it changes the sound, not the load. The needle reads gain reduction, and the scale is set by the same curve that moves it.
Live 11, no. It needs Live 12 with Max for Live, on either system. Live Intro and Live Lite cannot run Max for Live devices. No internet, account or key. Instant download through Gumroad, one file.
Eight ratios, a harmonic stage, a mode that squeezes harder the harder you hit, and a needle that tells the truth.
Through Gumroad · instant download · free updates
Ableton Live 12 · Suite or Standard with Max for Live
Download, drop it in, use it on every machine you own for as long as you own them. Updates land in your Gumroad library for free. Found a bug? Write me and it gets fixed.
