Sidechained reverb
Sidechaining reverbs is something I personally found super useful in certain situations for vocal processing. For example, sometimes you can find yourself in a situation where you have found a lush reverb, and you really want to use it on your vocals, but for some reason, you just don’t seem to be able to set it right. If you add a bit more, it makes your vocals sound too washed out; if you add a bit less, then it seems to sound too dry. In this case, of course, you can look for a different type of reverb and settings, but maybe you can also try to sidechain the reverb. The sidechain will duck down (reduce in volume) each time the vocals come on, and when there are no vocals in the playback, the reverb level comes back up. This can also be used very creatively in slower tracks with more spaced-out vocals (in terms of having long spaces between words or phrases), so the increased level of reverb can beautifully fill out these spaces.
Let’s see how to set this up in Live!
- In the Chapter 16 project, navigate to the Sidechained Reverb track; this track has some vocals playing back.
- Insert Hybrid Reverb and a Compressor device onto a Return Track.
- After ensuring that Hybrid Reverb is set to 100% with the Dry/Wet knob, send a significant amount of the vocals (called a Sidechained Reverb track) via the Sends section of the Mixer to the Return Track where you inserted Hybrid Reverb and the Compressor device. (To refreshyourself on how Sends and Return Tracks work, visit Chapter 7, Discovering Some of Live 11’s Creative Audio Effects, and refer to the Understanding the difference between Insert Effect Chains and Return Tracks section.)
- Group Hybrid Reverb and the Compressor device into an Audio Effect Rack. Now open and enable the Sidechain section on Compressor (Figure 16.12).
(To refresh on sidechain compression, you can refer to the Sidechaining techniques section in Chapter 7, Discovering Some of Live 11’s Creative Audio Effects).
Figure 16.12 – The Hybrid Reverb and Compressor devices grouped into an Audio Effect Rack, and the Sidechain section is open and enabled in the Compressor device
Now, in the Sidechain section, from the Audio From drop-down menu pick the track that we are working with (Sidechained Reverb), which has the vocals playing as the external sidechain source (Figure 16.13).
Figure 16.13 – Selecting the external sidechain source
- Once this is done, you can now adjust the Compressor device’s Threshold, Attack, Release, Ratio, and Out controls to control the sidechain effect.
This technique can be a great weapon for corrective and creative processing purposes.
In the next section, we will work further with the Compressor and look at how we can apply parallel compression in Ableton Live.
