Today, we’re going to use Presence to enhance a short piece of cinematic music. Presence is a multimode and multiband exciter plugin with a few extra features up its sleeve that can help you refine mixes and even single tracks. We will use it to enhance the low end of our mix and add some clarity as well as definition to it.
Before we start working, here’s the song we’ll use in today’s session:
Double Excitement
The first thing we do is placing the plugin on the master bus. Presence features three modes, which define the overall operation of the plugin: ‘Replace’ means that the newly generated content is added to the original signal whereas the same frequency area is ducked; ‘Sustain’ means that the original signal stays on top and ducks the newly generated content; and ‘Mix’ means that both the original and the new signal are mixed together. Since our song sounds alright already, i. e. doesn’t need drastic improvement we go for ‘Mix’. We also raise the input (‘GAIN’) a bit to drive the exciter circuit a bit more.
Next up is the high pass filter in the lower left corner of the interface. We set it to something between 25Hz and 30Hz to remove some of the very low rumble. After that comes the main section: two frequency bands with individual controls for the excitement amount. For cinematic music often requires a powerful bass sound we turn the LOW-control all the way down to 50Hz and the corresponding ACTION-knob to 100. To add some clarity and definition to the mix, we also use the second band: the HIGH-control is set to about 6.8kHz while the ACTION-knob is raised only a bit.
Now the mix sounds clearer, but also a little bit harsh. We can use the tilt filter in the lower right corner to shift the frequency spectrum, without sacrificing any of the excitement effect.
The interface of the plugin should now look something like this: 
The Result
This is what our mix sounds like with Presence engaged:
You can download the preset for Presence here: cinematic-mix-enhancer-preset-fxp