A snare that will not cut through is rarely a snare that is too quiet. Push the fader and the whole drum comes up together: the stick, the shell, the ring and the hi-hat bleed riding along underneath. The mix gets louder and the snare still sounds soft, because the part the ear uses to place a drum, the first few milliseconds of the hit, has not changed relative to everything after it.
Crack is a ratio. It is the level of the attack compared with the level of what follows, and a transient shaper changes that ratio directly instead of changing the level of the whole drum. What follows is a way to set one on a snare, with the control names from Trans-Box, a transient shaper and a parallel body compressor in one box.
Attack and sustain are two separate jobs
A transient shaper works by following the drum with two envelopes, one fast and one slow. The fast one jumps on the hit; the slow one lags behind it. Where they differ is the transient, and the shaper turns the gain up or down across that window. After the hit, when the envelopes converge again, a second control acts on what remains: the body and the ring.
In Trans-Box those two jobs are SMACK and SUSTAIN. SMACK gives up to +15 dB of attack or takes away up to -24 dB of it. SUSTAIN gives up to +18 dB of body or takes away up to -29 dB of ring. Turning SMACK up is the direct answer to "more crack": the stick gets louder and the tail does not.
The catch with most shapers is that their detection follows level. A loud rimshot triggers them hard, a ghost note barely triggers them at all, and the snare ends up with two different characters depending on how hard it was played. Trans-Box measures the distance between its two envelopes in decibels rather than in absolute level, so a ghost note gets the same shape as a rimshot. The same property is why hi-hat bleed and the noise floor, well below the track's own hits, are left alone: they never register as the snare's transients, so they are not sharpened along with it.
Two more details matter on a snare in particular. A 0.8 ms lookahead has the gain up before the stick lands, so the very front of the hit is shaped rather than the moment just after it. And the gain moves at different speeds in three bands, with the smack leaning toward the crack, so more SMACK means more stick rather than more boom, and low notes never crunch.
The easiest way to set SMACK is not to listen to the snare at all. Press DELTA, which plays only what Trans-Box is adding or taking away, and bring SMACK up until the crack on its own sounds right. It is much easier to hear when you have gone too far with the difference isolated than with it buried in the drum. Then switch DELTA off.
If the snare rings, SUSTAIN goes the other way. Negative SUSTAIN shortens a ringy snare without touching the hit, which often does more for the crack than adding attack does: with the ring tucked in, the stick is the loudest thing left.
Body underneath, and a ceiling on top
A snare with nothing but attack sounds thin, like a stick on a practice pad. The usual mix-template answer is a second send to a fast, heavy compressor, blended in underneath to give the backbeat weight. Trans-Box folds that send into the same box as GIRTH: a band on the drum's own fundamental feeding a fast 6:1 compressor, blended in parallel and time-aligned with the shaped drum.
GIRTH tunes itself. It pitch-tracks each hit's ring and glides to it, so the band follows the drum rather than a frequency you guessed. A snare's shell lands around 190 to 240 Hz; hover over the SQUEEZE lamp to see the pitch it has found and its release. That release follows the playing, so fills stay tight and half-time grooves bloom. In practice there is only one decision to make: turn GIRTH up until the backbeat has weight.
The order matters here. Set SMACK first, then GIRTH, then SUSTAIN. The crack decides whether the snare is heard; the girth decides whether it feels heavy once it is; and SUSTAIN cleans up whatever ring the first two exposed.
Adding up to 15 dB of attack creates a problem of its own: the peak of every hit goes up with it. Put a limiter after that and it shaves off the exact thing you just added. GUARD sits at the very end of the chain and holds the output under -1 dBTP in two layers. It rides the whole output down first, so the shape of the hit survives, then catches whatever is left with a lookahead true-peak limiter. The GUARD lamp shows when it is working, and the edgewise meter shows both halves at once: the pointer reads output peak on the upper scale, and the red cursor reads SMACK gain on the lower one.
MIX blends the processed and dry drum in parallel, time-aligned, and OUTPUT gives ±12 dB of level for the last trim.
Checking that it is crack and not volume
This is the step that answers the title. Any processor that makes a drum louder will make it sound better in an A/B, whether or not it improved anything. Turn MATCH on and toggle BYPASS: the dry snare comes back at the processed loudness, so what changes between the two is punch, not level. If the processed snare still wins with the levels matched, it is cutting through for the right reason. If the difference disappears, the snare was only louder, and the fader could have done that.
For a starting point rather than a blank panel, load the Snare Smack preset: the stick jumps out, the ring tucks in and the body fills in underneath. There are 13 factory presets, among them Crack & Tight and Backbeat Girth, plus Smack Send and Girth Send for templates that keep separate sends.
To try this on your own snare, run Trans-Box with a 14-day free trial of the full version. Load Snare Smack, press DELTA and set SMACK by ear, pull SUSTAIN negative until the ring stops, then turn MATCH on and bypass it to hear whether the snare is cracking or just louder.