This time I was 1776
This one didn't take a lot of EQ, but a key point was BASS for obvious reasons- that the desired ME was 'Big Bass' Gardner, that the bassline throws in crazy subsonic rumblings at the slightest provocation. In fact the bass is so out of hand that all the EQ alterations are in the way of treble boosts. There's shelves at 400, 1300, 4911 and 6500 hz stacked on top of each other, always boosting the highs, and even then the lows get unmanageable when the subs kick in. The shelves aren't very big, though, because I wanted it not to be too tizzy. All under 1 db. (it still ended up too bright- I fixed my monitoring some and then tried it with less than half the boost, and it was better)
I started using Chebyshev polynomials to produce harmonic synthesis (there's a Tom Erbe plugin that does this, but the current interface is impractical- I ended up writing my own version). I ended up with 0.348% second harmonic, 0.7 percent third and 0.6 percent fifth. There's some pre-de-emphasis in there- for instance the 0.7 percent third harmonic is actually 6.3 percent taken out before compression and seven percent added back. I don't know what these would compare to on processors like the HEDD, other than 'very little effect'. (Again- the brightness added here was excessive in retrospect- this more than the shelves is where the 'thin' came from)
The biggest problem was the subsonic rumbles (octave dividers?) which are basically a big flapping sound. It would be easy if I wasn't trying to hit the level so hard. I ended up having to edit the track very slightly in Amadeus after mastering it, just to smooth off some artifacts produced by those pant-flapping subs hitting the limiting and everything. It'll be interesting to hear that stuff hitting other people's chains because it wreaked havoc on mine!
I found that I was keying off the strings in the background some of the time- I could tell if a decision was good by whether it made the strings sound bigger and better, since they were buried behind a lot of other stuff.
Evil mad scientistness for this WUMP- trying to build second harmonic generation into the limiter keyed to a heavily lowpassed version of the track so that when the peaks got clamped, the body of the track would be violently deformed in the direction of the bass. This takes advantage of how hard it is to hear second harmonic. It worked, some people noticed the level of the subs without being told.
I had a hell of a time making the bulk of the track be hot, but I was getting upwards of 9 db of peak limiting so much of the time that I threw up my hands and said, hey, if this isn't going to be wildly altered in EQ then the bass and the pulse is going to take up all the room here and it's going to get really slammed on those elements to make the rest of it solid. Possibly this was a mistake but I'm good with it. Hottest peaks are coming in around -3.2dbFS, avg. -12dbFS.
I ran a separate pass with a bass crossover point in the EQ rolled way back, just for the subs part, so the rest of the track would sound similar, and I spliced it in. That's after I already tried to remedy the 'splat' with EQing those bass hits. This was a ridiculous move, but oh well: there was no way to have best of both worlds otherwise. The track remains super-smokin-hot largely because I wanted a sense of fullness and solidity, plus I took 'hip hop track, make it slammin' to mean 'as hot and solid as possible but big'. I didn't read it as 'keep squeaky clean', I read it as 'don't make the bass fart out'. I got the bass pretty ridiculously phat for such a loud track, thanks to the well-balanced and ambitious mix. It still farts out tho
