One technical approach I found that is quite effective
at that is to
jack everything through compressors. (I know, it's not new, I just
didn't know that). Get some white noise with an envelope, a formant
filter, and a low pass filter, and pipe it through two sets of LADSPA
compressors jacked to max (small attack, small release, large knee,
maximum compression, small theshold) and it sounds like your average FAT
dance track snare from scratch. Penetrating enough to make your average
metal worker notice it.
This does sound cool. Hope you don't mind if i steal/borrow/use this
idea and add it to smack? It sounds good. Check out the file
compsnare.om in smack svn in you want to hear my patch for it. ;-)
Loki