Author Topic: Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.  (Read 32843 times)

Luke Bond

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Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.
« on: January 07, 2016, 03:26:13 pm »
This is something I've been doing for a while now and it's greatly improved my mixes.

NOTE: This is for mix control as not the "Ducking effect" (I recommend something like LFO tool for that)

A lot of people tend to use their kicks to trigger their side-chains, which works great in some cases but the tail of the kick often leads to it going over the top and loosing a lot of the sound.

I've attached a really tight "Tap" which I use as the trigger for my side-chain, it has no tail at all and makes all the difference.

LINK: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5limc6187qbrh06/TIGHT%20SIDECHAIN%20128BPM.aiff?dl=1

Here are my compressor settings.



I use this a lot of my sounds;

Lead Bus
Bass Bus
Pads

Anything thats prominent in the track and going over a beat.

Give it a try and see how your mix turns out, your kick should really start to punch through nicely.

Here's one of my tracks that I've applied this technique.


Hope it helps ;D

Babasmas

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Re: Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.
« Reply #1 on: January 07, 2016, 04:06:57 pm »
In Fl studio, we have the "Limiter" Which is a plugin working the same way you do your sidechain.

It is a compressor but you link your kick to it and it work like a sidechain compression. The thing is here, you can change the release time of the kick you've link without changing the kick sounds.
Looks like this :


You can bend the envelope and use 8 differents curve for it. that's better for sidechain than everything I've tried before. (Threshold, Ratio, gain, Saturation, Knee, It's really basic limiter.)

Scribit

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Re: Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.
« Reply #2 on: January 07, 2016, 04:44:01 pm »

A lot of people tend to use their kicks to trigger their side-chains, which works great in some cases but the tail of the kick often leads to it going over the top and loosing a lot of the sound.

I've attached a really tight "Tap" which I use as the trigger for my side-chain, it has no tail at all and makes all the difference.

I really agree with this. Never use the kick in your mix as the side-chain trigger. It causes you to change your kick just to change your side-chain effect. In order to stay in complete control you should separate the two and have them changeable without effecting each other.
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Stax

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Re: Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.
« Reply #3 on: January 07, 2016, 05:31:23 pm »
If you do use a kick make sure to use the ADSR envelope to make it where only the transient is passing through the signal. Also I have used clap, snares, vocals and synths as a side chain signal.
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Volant

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Re: Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.
« Reply #4 on: January 07, 2016, 05:52:06 pm »
I personally find that using one short clicky sidechain for the transient on top of another sidechain with a longer decay can sometimes help make drum transients appear sharper in the mix without needlessly pumping everything else so much. Need to finetune the ratio on the compression then of course since it will mess with the sound otherwise.

Aerithos

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Re: Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.
« Reply #5 on: January 07, 2016, 06:32:28 pm »
I've found using MIDI triggered Volume Shaper 4 gives incredible control as a sidechain. You can really do some cool suppression type response (like in Flume's remix of Lay Me Down), or separate the release for the upper and lower frequency bands to allow most of the instrument to come through immediately after the attack while the tail of the kick dominates the <100hz range for it's full length.

BrienWithAnE

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Re: Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.
« Reply #6 on: January 07, 2016, 06:37:48 pm »
Do you guys think there is a benefit to sidechain compression vs. ducking?  I have recently been enjoying the ease and simplicity of ducking... just have to automate on/off of the plugin (Kickstart)
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Monoverse

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Re: Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.
« Reply #7 on: January 07, 2016, 06:45:54 pm »
Do you guys think there is a benefit to sidechain compression vs. ducking?  I have recently been enjoying the ease and simplicity of ducking... just have to automate on/off of the plugin (Kickstart)

with plugins like kickstart/lfotool they're more like quick fixes for a simple solution. with sidechain compression, you can get some really interesting results using different triggers/settings/compressors. compressors can color the sound which could be a good thing for your track. all depends on what you're looking to do. if you just want the ducking effect in a 4/4 track there's nothing wrong with slapping on kickstart/lfotool to get the job done

dontloveme

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Re: Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.
« Reply #8 on: January 07, 2016, 06:57:07 pm »
i personally like to use white noise as a sidechain trigger. lets you sculpt exactly what you want.

Wontolla

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Re: Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.
« Reply #9 on: January 07, 2016, 07:04:18 pm »
I route my kick and snare to busses, where I filter out everything below about 2k. That mostly just leaves the transient at the start, which you can use to drive the sidechain and get a similar effect.

Eskai

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Re: Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.
« Reply #10 on: January 07, 2016, 07:27:07 pm »
A quick question on Sidechain -

Does anyone ever use multiband sidechain compression? In this particular instance, I'm looking to duck only the Sub from my Bass bus but not the higher frequencies. I was playing with Trackspacer for this purpose.

Would be interested to see what other techniques people use.

Aerithos

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Re: Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.
« Reply #11 on: January 07, 2016, 07:40:38 pm »
A quick question on Sidechain -

Does anyone ever use multiband sidechain compression? In this particular instance, I'm looking to duck only the Sub from my Bass bus but not the higher frequencies. I was playing with Trackspacer for this purpose.

Would be interested to see what other techniques people use.
What I recommended previously, Volume Shaper 4, will do this perfectly. It's a 3 band volume envelope processor with MIDI triggering.

Eskai

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Re: Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.
« Reply #12 on: January 07, 2016, 07:41:59 pm »
A quick question on Sidechain -

Does anyone ever use multiband sidechain compression? In this particular instance, I'm looking to duck only the Sub from my Bass bus but not the higher frequencies. I was playing with Trackspacer for this purpose.

Would be interested to see what other techniques people use.
What I recommended previously, Volume Shaper 4, will do this perfectly. It's a 3 band volume envelope processor with MIDI triggering.
Oh very cool. I'll check this out!

Froste

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Re: Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.
« Reply #13 on: January 08, 2016, 12:24:53 am »
I use another sidechain technique (in FL) which is creating a ghost kick and sending it to the mixer channel with a Fruity Peak Controller. Then you can control how much sidechain you want.

Tiongcy

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Re: Side chaining trick that makes your kick punch right through.
« Reply #14 on: January 08, 2016, 02:39:50 am »
A quick question on Sidechain -

Does anyone ever use multiband sidechain compression? In this particular instance, I'm looking to duck only the Sub from my Bass bus but not the higher frequencies. I was playing with Trackspacer for this purpose.

Would be interested to see what other techniques people use.

Kill the noise posted a video on facebook regarding this. Will try to find it and link it here