Sidechain is often taught as one size fits all. You just need one setting for every time that you sidechain to duck your bass out of the way for your kick.
But if you ask us, it’s so much more than that. Sidechain can be used not only to create space in your low end but also to shape the way your track sounds.
So in this post, Fabio from Noize is going to walk you through the sidechain modes you should be using for better mixes.
The simplest way to set up a sidechain is to
- Grab a compressor
- Feed your kick into it
- Turn the ratio all the way up
- Go with fast attack and fast release
- Make sure your compressor has the external setting on
Some compressors you’ll need to turn on, and others will automatically trigger once you feed the sidechain in.
Doing all that allows us to feed the kick into the compressor that’s sitting on top of our bass, which will duck in volume every time the kick plays. The kick triggers the compressor, not the baseline. By decreasing the threshold we can increase the amount of ducking that occurs.
This is useful for two reasons:
1. It takes the volume out of the bass to make room for the kick.
Both have low frequencies so there’s a bit of natural conflict there.
2. It creates that nice pumping sound.
That’s how we add bounce to a track, which is what gets people grooving and moving.
But if we invest some more time shaping our sidechain compressor, we can make it do a lot more. Instead of just ducking out the low end, we can impact the way the entire track feels.
Setting up Your Compressor for Sidechain
The first thing we’re going to do is engage the EQ, which is engaging the sidechain input, e.g., the kick. By cutting out the low frequencies here, all we’re doing is cutting out the low frequencies from the kick that’s coming into the compressor.
The reason we want to do that is because the high end of the kick is actually much shorter than the low end. The kick gets its boom from the low end, so by sweeping up and getting rid of the low end, we’re just left with the click.
Rolling off the low end means we’ll also have to decrease the threshold to get more of that sidechain compression because the click is a quieter signal compared to that boom that we’ve taken out.
By opening the display on the Pro-C2, we can see how much snappier and faster the compressor is reacting to the click of the kick rather than the full thing.
Next we’re going to add some lookahead. This helps with some of that clicking that we sometimes get with sidechaining. If you’re sidechaining a lot, you might notice a pop that happens on the high end.
Lookahead, which gets the digital plugin to look ahead in time, can proactively prevent that annoying pop sound.
Clean vs Pumping
So, we’ve got the main setting in our compressor set up for the sidechain. The next thing we want to look at in the Pro-C2 are the algorithms. (Other compressors come with this function too, so it’s worth digging into them.)
Algorithms are the shapes that the attack and release take to react to the incoming signal. For this track, we’ll be looking at two options: Clean and Pumping.
Clean is best when you want something surgical and precise. Meanwhile, Pumping adds more bounce. Because of the nature of this track, we want more of that bounce because it matches the genre and plays into the energy the artist is trying to create.
When we listen to the Pumping version, you can feel the difference in the movement of the low end, which makes you want to dance a little bit more. It’s a subtle change but an important one.
Finally, we’re going to adjust the release. We want more control here because we’re just reacting to the click of the kick. That way we can go as short and tight or as long and loose as we want to.
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So there you have it. Sidechain is about more than ducking your bass out of the way to make room for the kick. It’s also about the bounce you can add to your track and controlling your sidechain to be surgical or smooth.
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