While it’s not that tough to learn to setup sidechain compression in that way, and it helps to understand how to manipulate a compressor’s controls, two of the coolest boutique plug-in developers for electronic music have crafted tools that were purpose built to perform sidechain-style compression with minimal setup and tweaking. From there, you have to make sure the Threshold is set low enough for the kick to trigger it, adjust the severity of the compression with the Ratio control, dial in the timing of the effect with the Attack and Release settings, etc. Ableton Live 9 Compressor SidechainingMake sure the Sidechain Toggle arrow is open, turn on the Sidechain switch on, and set the Audio From input to your kick drum track (see image). It’s pretty easy to set up sidechaining with those effects. For example, Ableton Live 9 has six stock effects with sidechaining built in: Auto Filter, Compressor, Corpus, Gate, Glue Compressor and Multiband Dynamics. Sidechain Compression SetupĪ lot of DAW programs these days include stock plug-in effects that include sidechain functionality built in. When sidechaining the kick drum to a compressor on a bass track using a mid-range compression ratio, you may not even realize it’s there, but will realize if it’s taken away because the articulations of the bass and kick drum will become less clear. With the right ratio set on the compressor, this can produce a subtle-to-extreme pumping sound to the music.īut more importantly, sidechain compression can be a vital mixing tool for stopping low-frequency tracks from interfering with each other in the mix and producing bass mud in the music. Most commonly, you feed a quarter-note kick drum track into the sidechain of a compressor that attenuates the volume of a synth pad, bass or whole group of tracks when the kick drum sounds. You can think of it like the kick drum scooping out the frequencies from the compressed tracks. The technique uses the audio signal of one track to trigger a compressor (or sometimes a gate) placed on a second track so that the second track is silenced or quieted when the first track exceeds a certain dB threshold. Sidechain compression gained infamy with the extreme pumping sounds of French house (think “Around the World” or “One More Time” by Daft Punk for well-known examples) and is now just about required of any dance or pop music, especially music using four-to-the-floor quarter-note kick drum patterns. Ride the waves of their results after the jump. Since the technique is so ubiquitous, what is the best plug-in for the job? Three affordable short-cut plug-ins to sidechain compression make the process easy. It’s the technique that melds the bass to the kick drum and creates a rhythmic pulsing to the music that has moved dancefloors since at least ’97. If you produce electronic music in 2015, chances are you will need to apply sidechain compression to some of your instrument tracks.
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