LFOTool sucks so we made Duck Buddy, the sidechainer of my dreams! (FREE DOWNLOAD)

[Music] sidechain compression it's a subject that i'm very passionate about most of the time when you're listening to music you don't even notice it but it's always there secretly making the drums sound fatter it's a powerful mix down technique that every producer should be using sidechain compression as a concept is pretty simple when something plays usually a kick or a snare drum it reduces the volume of something else usually a bass line the reason we use sidechain is to allow important sounds to cut through the mix without totally annihilating our headroom kick drums are short and you don't even notice that the bass line volume was negative infinity for like 100 milliseconds unless you do want it to be noticeable every house track ever anyway side chain should be simple but for some reason it's not why are we still using compressors to sidechain they don't give me enough control over the timings or the volume curve and i always get clicks the whole idea of using a compressor to sidechain with is hilarious given that most of us writing electronic music use ghost notes to trigger the side chain or anyway we might as well just have a midi triggered volume shaper come to think of it you could probably just open up the stock ableton shaper in max for live and stick on a midi trigger feature and it'll be way more useful than a compressor and that's exactly what we did thanks to a very small new max for live feature in ableton 11 some friends and i on my discord server created my dream sidechain compression device in max for live which you can download free i'll show you how it works but i know what you're thinking why don't you just use lfo tool or gatekeeper or volume shaper true true but the workflow with these plugins sucks and i'll explain why in a minute but you do have more control over the side chain shape and timing so most people just deal with the sucky workflow alternatively using the stock ableton compressor has a much better workflow but you have no control over the shape and if you want any kind of precise timings you've got to use ghost notes let me show you what i mean so i've got a kick drum and some chords and we want to side chain the kick drum to the chords now normally how you would do that is grab a compressor and throw it on the chords and then turn on side chain mode and select the kick drum like this and then some typical settings would be something like that and it sounds like this now that's all well and good but when we start to tweak the release time let's say for example i want to put this all the way down to one millisecond you can hear that that's not really one millisecond and actually we can measure how much time that is just by recording it and then zooming in and having a look you can see that it's actually about 100 milliseconds which is the length of the kick drum here so what's actually happening with the compressor is that in sidechain mode it has to finish listening to the kick drum before the release time actually starts so that means that we can't get a release time of less than 100 milliseconds you know the length of the kick plus this so ideally what we would like to happen is you know here's an example i've got a kick drum here and the chords the kick drum sort of tapers off in volume so what i'd like to do is have the chords kind of fade up in volume something like this would be ideal but how do we do that well the answer is obviously using ghost notes so what do i mean by ghost notes well if the sidechain compressor is dependent on the length of the input then we kind of want the shortest input possible so that we have more range to work with with this release knob so i have a new midi channel here with an operator playing a really short burst of noise at about zero db and i'm talking one millisecond short it's super short so let's copy and paste the midi information from our kick up to the ghost note channel and then on the chords channel we'll switch the sidechain compression audio from kick to ghost note and now let's set the release time to something like 7 and take a listen [Music] so that's what i'm talking about now we have like a lot shorter of a release time you know as opposed to this so let's tweak this in a little bit more we'll go with a little bit of a higher release time and we'll unmute the kick and see how it sounds [Music] so that is a lot more transparent now you can't really hear that pumping and look at that that's a perfect little fade which is kind of what we were after over here in this example so we've achieved a more precise timing using a ghost note and that's what i'm talking about now the workflow with these ghost notes and the sidechain compressors can be really fast and really awesome if you set up something like this that i've been using for years here inside this cell we have the same operator that we'll be using before playing one millisecond of noise and the utility there to just boost the volume of it it's on a drum rack cell and i've duplicated that onto the cell next to it and called it snare signal so we've got kick signal and snare signal now usually when i'm programming my drums i have kick and snare in those two same cells so this makes it really easy when i need to trigger a kick signal to send to my sidechainers every time the kick or snare plays all i have to do is copy and paste the midi information from my drum rack here playing the actual samples to the sidechain signal sender thingy i don't know what to call it now over here very conveniently i also have two racks now within this rack there is two side chain compressors and they are already linked to these signal cells here so anytime this place or this plays with the midi notes you can see that the side chain is activated now all that's left to do is copy and paste this to any channel on your entire project and that channel will be sidechained just like this so now the chords are star change and we have these handy macros to tweak it if we like and done side chain done and the great thing about this is we have independent control over the release times for the snare and the kick and if i copy and paste this to a new channel i can tweak the settings again for different sounds that need more or less side chaining maybe this sub bass doesn't need any side chaining from the snare at all so we can turn that off and it's that quick flexibility that makes this workflow so awesome if we don't want a side chain for a section we delete the midi notes and it's just really really versatile and this is a channel strip that you can save in your user library and use and actually if you go to my website and buy my essential ableton toolbox this is one of the channel strips that's included the last thing to talk about with this stock ableton sidechain compressors is the different curves so in the live eight version of the compressor there's actually a different curve compared to the newer i'm going to call it the live 9 compressor because that's when they changed it i have both available on this channel strip for different situations this one seems to be a little bit more gouging this one seems to be a little bit more like logarithmic or something they have a different sound but the most notable difference is the fact that the live 8 sidechain compressor doesn't click your subs as much as the live 9 one does so let's do an example of that really quickly so if i put this live 9 side channel on this sub here and hit play you can hear the sub clicking and that's because the volume is instantly dropping to the zero point and this kind of resembles more of a square wave which as you know has a lot more harmonics than a nice smooth sine wave that is a click right there folks and there's no way to avoid it now let's try the live 8 sidechain compressor and we'll record that too i'll have to change the release time because it's again a bit more gougey so as you can see there's no big click there which is really nice it sounds great on deep subs and nice smooth sine waves like this so that's why i have both racks here ready to go this one sounds better on bass sounds and sounds that you really need to gouge and this one sounds better on mid to high range stuff the workflow is great you can kind of get around the clicks but there's only two shapes available okay so we've seen the pros and cons of the stock ableton sidechainer what about lfo tool and gatekeeper and the rest of them why do i think the workflow with those plugins sucks so much well in this example we'll be using a free plugin called stfu and i'll put a link in the description to download it if you want the reason i'm using this instead of lfo tool or whatever is because all these vst side chainers work fundamentally in the same way you send it a midi note and then the shape activates and the key here is that you have to send the midi note to this plugin you can't select which note you want to listen to in the project on the plugin itself so let's just go through an example here we've got our kick and snare and our chords we've got the stfu on our chords channel so let's send this a midi note every time the kick plays and we'll do that by using an external instrument drag an external instrument in so that it's parallel with the kick drum and send the output to the stfu and we'll do the same for the snare external instruments and the output to the chords the stfu and now [Music] cool i love the control of the shape but you're going to see in a second here that this spiral is out of control now if i want to sidechain my sub bass i can just copy and paste this stfu to my sub base right and everything works yeah nope nope you got to go back into your drum rack duplicate the external instrument so that we can send a new copy of that midi note to the stfu on the sub bass channel and same with the snare copy that send a new copy of the midi note to the stfu on the sub bass channel and now both things are being sidechained so as you can see this is going to spiral out of control very quickly with more and more channels now one argument is you could have all the channels going into a group and just have one on the group but that's sacrificing freedom i want to be able to have different thresholds and different shapes for different channels i might also want a separate sidechain settings for my kick and my snare so the all the freedoms that we had with the stock ableton sidechain compressors where you're able to have different sidechain settings on a per kick per snare per channel basis is all gone unless you're willing to duplicate this a million times and it's just a terrible workflow and i think it could have been so much better if we could select which midi channel we want to listen to on the plugin itself rather than having to send midi from our instrument to the stfu or the lfo tool or the gatekeeper they all work the same way things get even more out of control when you realize that the stfu doesn't have a lookahead feature like the ableton stock sidechainers do the lookahead feature is used to kind of smooth out clicks now ableton sidechain compressors aren't the greatest at smoothing out clips but they do an okay job but let's take a look at the clicks on the stfu that click is pretty major we could smooth out that transition a little bit like this okay that works but now we're running over a little too much so if there was some way we could pull this back like this it'd be perfect but again the workflow to be able to do something like that is painful let me show you how it's done so instead of taking the midi information from the kick using the external instrument and sending it straight to the stfu what i've done here is created a brand new midi channel called look ahead and i've just copied the kick drum midi notes up onto that channel and i've set a delay of negative 10 milliseconds to this channel so now if i set the output of this to the sub base which has the stfu on there and then we hit record let's zoom in and see if we can see an improvement there okay yeah that's looking pretty good we might need a little bit more of a delay and it should be perfect i'm not hearing any clicks and that's bang on the money right there okay it works i'm not arguing that it doesn't work but now think about the workflow now i need to do the same thing with the snare so i'm going to have to duplicate this channel and then copy all the snare media information to that channel and then set up the same look ahead and send that to the same one okay so now we're side chaining from the kick and the snare now we want to do the chords so that means twice as many look-ahead channels and i mean these could all be in a group collapsed but it just gets out more and more out of control okay so now that you've seen all the pros and cons of other ways of sidechaining i hope you'll really appreciate all the work and thought that we've put into duck buddy so it looks like a regular ableton shaper it acts the same way you can click to create a new node shift click to delete a node and alt click drag up and down to change the shape of the curve and here is where we select which midi channel we want to listen to so in this case we want to listen to the drums midi channel and actually on the drums midi channel we have a drum rack with kick snare in there so if we wanted to we could select midi notes that appear only on the kick cell or only on the snare cell but in this case we're just going to listen to all the notes that are coming from that channel and that's it we're sidechaining [Music] and let's just render some of that so you can see it so i already rendered the kick and snare as you can see there's a little bit of delay when you're rendering or resampling in this case and it looks like we have a really slight click so let's try to fix that using the look ahead feature so we'll just go with like five milliseconds but we can choose all the way up to 20 milliseconds if we want to and then i think a ramp of like four ish would work good a smoothing value of say 10 or 15 should should work great let's just render that and zoom in to see how we did perfect look at that so smooth plenty of room here and it's very accurate how awesome is that if we did want to tweak this a little bit more it might be annoying to just continue rendering this over and over again so we can bring up the big view and take a look at it through here and this gray box on the left represents how much of a look ahead time we have and we can see in real time we can see in real time the effects of these knobs and look ahead we can just dial it in while looking at it right here and you can see also that this waveform updates every time it receives a new midi note a new trigger it kind of looks like it's low frame rate or something but it's just printing down the waveform once every time it gets a new trigger so that's kind of how that works in case you're wondering but more on this later let's talk about some more of the features that are down here so with the length you can change the overall length of this shape and you can use note divisions or you can use milliseconds these lengths will be linked to the tempo and these will not so if you're doing something fancy with a tempo change in your track and you need to maintain a a certain type of curve you can use a specific tempo based length otherwise you can just use a millisecond length which is pretty cool this velocity button is next level i think this is really cool so let's take a look at this example over here we have a midi clip with a bunch of kicks and snares that have different velocity values and it sounds like this so kind of like pseudo echoes and stuff i just threw it in there as an example but with the velocity button turned on duckbuddy is able to listen to the velocity note of the incoming signal and then adjust the depth according to that so let me explain that a little bit more if we receive a midi note with a maximum velocity then the duck body will dock the volume to a maximum amount and that maximum amount is set with this depth knob and right now it's set to negative infinity so a maximum velocity note will duck by negative infinity a 50 velocity note will duck 50 of the way you know something like that and 75 etc etc it's going to basically duck more for higher velocity values and duck less for lower velocity values so you can do interesting things like this so right here you can see that there is a high velocity note and it's ducking quite a lot there and then over here we have a low velocity note and it's barely ducking at all pretty cool right i think that's super useful especially if you're like doing like little drum fills and stuff and you don't want to put that on a new channel or you don't want your drum fills that are not as loud as your main kick and snares to be ducking your bass line as much so a neat little feature that i think is really useful okay check this out we're going to talk about the gate button but to explain that we first need to understand how this works so the shape is a ducking shape usually which means that before and after the shape happens the volume just goes back to normal so the volume is normal then the duct shape happens and then once the duct shape is over the volume is back to normal but with the gate button on the volume will be set to the depth volume which is negative infinity right now and then when the shape engages the volume can go up and down and do whatever and then once the shape is over we head back down to the depth uh volume which is again negative infinity so we can kind of use this as a gate so what i've done is linked this duck buddy on this kind of pad sound to this midi information here which is lots of choppy midi notes so here's what it sounds like without this on [Music] okay so now let's listen with the duck body gate enabled [Music] pretty cool right and yeah you can automate the depth the cool thing about this is that the velocity button works in conjunction with the gate button so you could have all kinds of crazy uh velocity values here and that's going to change how things work as well [Music] pretty neat so it's not just a sidechain device it's also a pretty creative tool okay let's talk a little bit more about this large view which you can get to by clicking this button here for one we can change the zoom so that if you're running a high resolution monitor like i am you you don't have to squint to see these controls this whole box is actually resizable as well so you can make it as large or as small as you like and there's actually a few different views to talk about so right now we have the channel view open so what it's printing on this screen here is whatever the duck buddy is listening to on that channel [Music] so in this case just the baseline and we can actually change the range so we can see oh is it peaking or not [Music] it's pretty far away from peeking so we're good what we can also do is visualize any other channel in our project so let's take a look at the drums [Music] because i think it's cool to be able to see what we're sidechaining and what we're sidechaining from and actually what would be really cool is if we could see what it looks like when both of those signals are mixed together so let's turn on the mixed view and turn these other views off so now we're looking at [Music] the combination of the kick and the bass line together after the bass line is being sidechained what does that look like is it peaking or not [Music] you can see that now that i have changed the curve we're actually getting some peaks because the kick or snare drum is combining with the bass line which hasn't been side-chained enough and now we're causing a peak the volume is going higher than 0 db we can ride the line right between just enough side chain and not enough side chain where we're getting no peaks but we're also not gouging the sound unnecessarily because i think the goal for a lot of producers is to have some kind of transparency with their side chain so that the kick or snare slots right in there and you don't even notice that the bass line was even gone for a second [Music] you can really focus down on tweaking your side chain so that the shape and the time the length of time that the shape takes is just perfect enough to fit your song this visual tool really makes it super easy to do with all the other major features explained i guess the only other feature to talk about is kind of invisible and it was actually one of the hardest features to implement in dark body but it was also the feature that we needed the most to make this the ultimate sidechain compression device and that is the simple feature of being able to copy and paste this plug-in and have the links maintained so when we select drums and we even select say a drum rack cell within that midi channel if i copy and paste this plug-in you can see that the links are actually maintained and that makes the workflow of dark buddy awesome because now if i want to sidechain something else i can just control or command drag that onto a new channel and we're sidechaining this channel immediately because the links are already set up we've got the curve and all the other settings pasted on there we're ready to go and that's what makes duck buddy's workflow superior to lfo tool and all the other ones that suck because we're not in our drum rack creating a bunch of external instruments duplicating the same midi information that we have and we can adjust the curve we've got look ahead features right here i mean it's the ultimate side chain compression i couldn't dream of anything better than this so there you have it and i want to give a massive thank you to everyone who helped with this project a huge shout out to jalak thank you so much dude for helping to basically do all the heavy lifting and all the math and crazy programming that we had to do inside of max for life uh you really put in work and this plugin is awesome because of you uh iggy labs i gotta send a big thank you and a big shout out to you as well iggy labs is one of the cycling 74 employees and cycling 74 is the company that makes max for live so she was a great resource for myself and i like to call upon when we had a weird question and she actually came up with the original concept i was chatting in my discord dreaming of a sargeant plugin that didn't suck and we started putting together a few different iterations and this is one of eager labs iterations here that i've tweaked the gui on but you can see how we started from very humble beginnings to something a little bit more advanced until we got to this version and beyond but yeah big thanks to you iggy labs thank you very much she was actually the person who discovered that ableton 11 has a brand new feature that this whole plugin hinges upon so being able to select a midi channel to listen to in duck buddy we're able to do that because of a brand new feature in ableton 11. you can't use this plugin in ableton 10 unfortunately because ableton 10 doesn't have this feature so you just won't be able to select anything in here and the plugin will be useless iggy labs had her finger on the pulse and caught wind of this little addition that they added and then noticed that it would help immensely for creating the perfect sidechain device so big thank you to you iggy labs and also flood state and the rest of the guys on my discord server thank you so much for testing and detective work and all kinds of bug reporting and stuff but really the main man is joe like my boy if you want to get it follow the link in the description you can download doc buddy and start using it today for free so thanks for watching guys peace [Music] you

Channel: Slynk

Views: 31,078

Rating: 4.9250746 out of 5

Keywords: Ableton, Ableton Live, Tutorial, Sound Design, Learn Ableton, Music Production, EDM

Id: 16CcS7dj0zs

Length: 25min 42sec (1542 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021