Intro to Side-Chaining

hey Joe Gilder here from home studio corner today we're gonna talk about sidechaining what it is how to use it what situations you want to use it and how to set it up now I'm gonna explain that for a couple minutes what sidechaining is and define it and some common uses of it and then I'll show you we'll hop into a session and I'll show you how to set it up now there will always be someone who will complain that I'm talking too much just get to the showing us what buttons to push that's not learning if I just pulled up a video and said hey we're gonna click this to click this click this and you're done that wouldn't help you because if we don't set the context of what side-chaining is and when and why we would use it then knowing how to set up the routing and the plugins is fairly useless so I'm trying to give you a cohesive approach it's like going to the doctor I don't want to go see a doctor who has just memorized a treatment plan but doesn't really understand how the human body works and how to diagnose and take different information and make good medical decisions from them and it's the same in the studio less people die but still you want to know why you're doing what you're doing and have that understanding behind it and then the technical how you do it is really the easy part so what is side chaining side chaining is taking the signal from one track and using that signal to trigger something else to happen on another track that's the loose definition of side chaining I personally don't use side chaining a whole lot in my mixes but there are situations where I do and it's important to know how it works typically although not exclusively side chaining involves compression so I made some visual aids please don't be embarrassed about how amazing my drawing skills are you've got track number one this amazonbasics paper is awful like fax paper so you've got track number one track number one is what you could consider to be the trigger track the important component here is that it has a send that is sending this audio somewhere else we'll get to that in a second track number two the important thing here is this track has a compressor plug-in on it now where it gets fun is this compressor on track number two isn't listening to track number two but it is compressing track number two it's listening to track number one so we're using a send on track number one to trigger the compressor but the compressor is at compressing track number one it's compressing track number two based on what it hears from track number one and that's all well and good you could walk into intro to audio class and I could explain that to you and you'd say okay but what does that matter let me talk about some common situations where you might use sine chaining one really common example is ducking so in the radio world the voice over world you might have a DJ who's talking over a music bed one of the options is for him to literally have his finger on the fader for the music and when he's not talking he pushes the fader up and there's music and then when he starts to talk you can pull the fader down but if you don't want to be constantly riding the fader and you want it to be more automatic ducking would be the way to go so in that scenario the vocal will be on track number one with a send going over to the music track on track number two specifically sending over to that compressor so every time the DJ speaks the music gets turned down you've probably heard that on radio shows before musics nice and loud DJ starts talking music goes down DJ stops talking music comes back up and the attack and release settings of that compressor determine how quickly it gets turned down and how slowly it turns back up when he's done talking another common example in the mixing world is having the bass guitar duct by the kick drum so when the kick drum hits that triggers the compressor on the bass to turn it down briefly so the bass and the kick drum don't interfere I personally almost never use that but it's a common technique you probably want to know about a more advanced example is taking something like a simple synth like a sounding pad and then using something like an eighth-note hi-hat track to trigger a gate instead of a compressor on that synth pad so the gate is set to have the synth pad all the way down basically muted and then whenever a signal comes from the hi-hat say this hi-hat is going like that then that will trigger the gate it will open the gate to let the synth sound through so it's the same concept except instead of a compressor we're using a gate so if the synth that goes like this normally and then we use that side chaining with the gates to trigger it off of a hi-hat sound suddenly the synth goes so you heard that in lots of like pop and hip-hop and things like that you'll hear these synths that have this rhythmic thing to them that doesn't always mean that's how the sounds created but that's one way to do that and a lot of times you might have this trigger sound this this hi-hat track muted in the mix it's turned all the way down it's just using a pre fader send to send that trigger signal over to the synth gate to give it that rhythmic pattern that's way more advanced than I really wanted to get into but it does exist in something you can play around with now that's enough introduction let me jump into studio one and show you a specific scenario where I have used side-chaining and it works really well all right here's my song whitewash here's the lead vocal by itself it's got processing on at normal mix processing compression des or stuff like that it also has a slap back delay with some distortion on it and here's what it sounds like now let's just say we wanted there to be something to fill those little gaps between vocal phrases we thought you know something like a quarter note delay might be cool well I always have a quarter note delay in my session ready to go so I'm gonna use a send on my vocal tract to send it to this quarter note delay track over here let's see what that sounds like the top I like the idea but while the vocal is singing it's too distracting it interrupts the vocal but at the ends of the phrase this could be cool to have that delay come in now we could automate all that and it would take us quite a while to automate all those little volume changes or we could use sidechaining so I've put a compressor over here on my delay track after the delay plug-in there is a compressor plug-in now check it out I've got it set to pretty aggressive so really high ratio threshold we can figure out where that needs to be really fast attack in a middle-of-the-road release and over here at least in Studio One and your plugins will be different depending on what dog you're using it says sidechain now I can't select anything over here but it does seem to indicate that I can have some sort of external sidechain how do I get there well we go back to the original vocal track we've got our sins here for the delays we can create another send and go down here under side chains we can look at all the plugins in the session that can accept some sort of sidechain input so we just go find our quarter note delay track the compressor plug-in boom so now we are sending a copy of the vocal to that compressor for a good measure I will change it to pre fader so no matter what I do over here on this track it doesn't change the volume going to that trigger on that compressor and now when I hit play I'm gonna mute the audio for a second when I hit play you can see this compressor is being triggered by this vocal track even though this compressor is actually on the delay track not on the vocal track now let's see what that sounds like what's happening is when the vocal sings the delay is being turned down when the vocal stop singing the delay gets turned back up let's see what that sounds like the top boy I got around and here what happened there at the very end of the phrase round as soon as I said the compressor let go and the delay came back up is it the right choice for this song I don't know but you get the idea it is turning that delay down until the vocal stop singing or gets really quiet and then the delay comes back in listen to the difference if I turn off this compression listen to how that delay sounds the way too loud way too much it doesn't work at all with the compressor on we're now slapping that delay into submission while the vocalist is singing and then allowing it to come back up for air between phrases the taco boy got around and the powers-that-be disappear pretty fun stuff and as you can imagine you can get really creative and potentially even go overboard with this but it's a whole functionality that a lot of people don't realize exists and chances are it's already right there in your system waiting for you to try it out alright that wraps it up if you love mixing like I do and you don't have a system for working through your mix from start to finish you kind of feel like a chicken with its head cut off sorry to all the chicken lovers out there and you just kind of go and do lots of different things in kind of a crazy pattern maybe you need a system maybe you need to check out my five-step mix guide it's absolutely free go to five step mix com to download it and check it out thanks for watching the video see you in the next let's talk in the town I got around and the powers-that-be may disappear [Music]

Channel: Joe Gilder • Home Studio Corner

Views: 25,475

Rating: 4.9631338 out of 5

Keywords: mixing, gear, home recording, equipment, joe gilder, presonus, studio one, home studio

Id: Us2JwAkNEW8

Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2019