Applying sidechaining

Sidechaining (also known as ducking) is a compression technique where you use the input of one sound source to determine when to compress a second sound. This technique is used extensively in pop and electronic dance music to sidechain bass instruments whenever a kick drum sound occurs. The result is a rhythmic pumping bass sound associated with the urge to tap your feet and bob your head.

Sidechaining in electronic dance music uses the following rationale: sidechaining the bass sound reduces the bass sound when the kick drum comes in. This frees up space to allow the kick sound transient to punch through and focuses your ears’ attention more on the kick.

It should be noted that sidechaining can be applied to any sound and doesn’t have to involve percussion at all. A sidechain pumping sound of an instrument can be used on its own. For example, you may want to sidechain the bass instrument, even if you don’t have any percussion playing.

The fastest way to understand sidechaining is to use it in an example. In order to do the following example, you will need a bass instrument and a kick sound sample. You can use any bass instrument synthesizer and kick sound sample you like. In my example, I will be using the FL Studio Harmless synthesizer and use the default instrument setting when the plugin is loaded. The kick sample used is one that comes with FL Studio in the Pack folder found in the browser:

1. Load your kick sample and bass instrument into the channel rack. Create a clone of the kick sound sample in the channel rack. If you need a refresher on loading instruments, we covered it in Chapter 2, Exploring the Browser, Playlist, and Channel Rack.
2. Add a note every 1/4 bar for both of the kick samples.
3. Add the pattern to the playlist and name it Kick.
4. Route all channels in your channel rack to the mixer. Consider coloring your instruments and patterns for visual convenience. After completing these steps, your playlist and channel rack should look similar to the following:

Figure 6.7 – Sidechaining setup

5. Create a new pattern and name it Bass.
6. For the bass instrument (in my case, Harmless), add notes every 1/8 bar. Aim for the sound to have low bass by decreasing the pitch until the sound of the instrument is low. For Harmless, notes in the pitch of A2 are low enough. After adding bass instrument notes, your screen should look similar to the following:

Figure 6.8 – Bass notes in the channel rack

7. Add the pattern with the bass instrument to the playlist. Your playlist should look similar to the following with both the Kick pattern and the Bass pattern added. Note how the Kick and Bass notes line up each bar:

   

   Figure 6.9 – Playlist with both the bass instrument and kick

   You can now play the playlist and hear the bass instrument and the kick sounds.

8. Next, we’re going to apply sidechain compression to the bass instrument. This will cause the volume of the bass instrument to decrease whenever the kick drum occurs.
9. In the mixer, select one of the kick channels. Then, right-click on the arrow at the bottom of the bass instrument channel (Harmless) and select the Sidechain to this track only menu drop-down option:

   

   Figure 6.10 – Sidechaining kick to the bass instrument

   What we’ve done is told the signal of the kick drum to no longer route to the master channel. The signal from the kick sample is now being sent exclusively to the bass instrument channel to be used as an input for sidechaining.

10. Add the Fruity Limiter plugin to the Harmless mixer channel. Select COMP in Fruity Limiter.
11. In the SIDECHAIN control of Fruity Limiter, scroll to select 1. This will tell Fruity Limiter to listen for the kick audio. Your screen should look similar to the following:

Figure 6.11 – Fruity Limiter now accepts kick as a sidechain source

12. Play the song. At the same time, under the LOUDNESS and ENVELOPE sections of Fruity Limiter, add compression to your sound using the techniques we learned earlier in this chapter. The exact compression control adjustments will depend upon the sounds you are using, but when you’re done, it could look similar to the following:

Figure 6.12 – Fruity Limiter LOUDNESS and ENVELOPE sidechain settings

In the LOUDNESS and ENVELOPE controls, we’ve added compression to the sound. Remember, compression reduces the loudness of the sound.

We used a kick sound as an input for sidechaining. This is a little different from the simple compression we did in an earlier example. We’re using sidechaining to cause the bass instrument to compress only at certain times, rather than constantly throughout. The bass instrument gets compressed when it receives input from the sidechained kick channel. When the bass channel receives signal input from the kick channel, it tells the compression to start.

If you’ve done everything correctly, when you play your playlist, you should be able to hear the rhythmic pumping action of your bass instrument ducking every time the kick drum sound occurs. I encourage you to try adding sidechaining compression on your own on various bass instrument setups until you feel very comfortable with the technique. Sidechaining bass sounds is a technique you will use on many songs. Congratulations, you’ve successfully used sidechaining! Next, let’s learn how to use limiters.