The Mixing Engineer's Handbook, 3rd ed

get the bass and drums so they just start to pump to where you can actually hear them breathing in and out with the tempo of the song. What I’ll do is put the drums and bass in a limiter and just crush the hell out of it. Then I’ll play with the release and the attack times until I can actually make that limiter pump in time with the music, so when the drummer hits the snare, it sucks down and you get a good crest on it. When he lets go of the snare, the ambience of the bass and the drums suck and shoot back up again. You can actually hear a [breathing sound] going on that was never there before. It really was there; it’s just that you’re augmenting it by using that limiter.”

The trick to getting the punch out of a compressor is to let the attacks through and play with the release to elongate the sound.

Just remember that it usually sounds best if the EQ is placed before the reverb, not after it, because it has a great effect on the frequency response of the rever