Sidechain Compression Tutorial + 4 Favorite Methods in FL Studio 12

hey guys welcome to the sidechain compression tutorial in this video we're going to talk about what sidechain compression or sidechain ducking is the uses for it and I'm going to show you four methods for implementing it in your projects so what sidechain compression sidechain compression or sidechain ducking is the process of modulating or controlling the level of a sound based on the input from another sound now it's called sidechain compression because compressors are the most common way of achieving this effect however they're certainly not the only way as you're going to see in the examples to come there are primarily two uses for sidechain compression the first is letting the kick drum or another instrument punch through the mix or punch through another instrument as it's playing for example another use is to create a what's called a pumping effect for example now what's happening in both those examples that I just showed you is the same thing the second sound or in the first examples case the baseline and the second examples case the white noise is moving out of the way for the kick drum to come through now this technique is especially important when dealing with low frequencies like a kick drum and bass line and basically anything in the 150 Hertz and below region the reason is is because when sounds around these frequencies are playing at the same time they tend to conflict and that's called phase cancellation so what's happening is the phase of the waveforms are opposite of each other causing them to cancel out in other words you get no bass so for this example I've got a kick drum and a bass line now when I play these two together if you have a good enough sound system you're going to notice that the bass feels kind of bland and not very present take a listen you can tell hopefully that these two sounds are fighting for that same low frequency region around 150 Hertz and below if you can't tell or you don't have a good enough sound system I want to show you a plugin that I use in almost every single one of my projects and it's called wave candy and it helps you visualize the frequency space depending on whichever sounds are coming through it so I'm going to throw it on the master channel here here it is wave candy just so we can hear everything that's going on in this project and right now it's just the kick drum in the baseline so those are the only two sounds that are going to come through this thing so I'm just going to position it up here in the top right it's kind of the spot I like to keep it and I'm going to put it on spectrum mode and I'm going to turn down the update knob and max up the scale knob those are the settings I like to use on this thing so now when I play back the kick drum in the baseline let's take a look at what wave Candy's showing us okay and I just hit this freeze button here essentially and that freezes the view of wave candy so right off the bat I can tell that this is a problem if you look up here in the top left a hint bar as I mouse over a region in wave candy you'll see the frequency spot that the mouse cursor is hovering over and right about here where the mouse is is about 159 Hertz so anything from here on down is where the bass comes into play and I can tell they're conflicts because we have kick drums and bass lines on the same note and the low frequencies are fighting over this space so what we have here are basically the kick drums those are the l-looking things those are your kicks and then the four notes in between all the kicks are your bass notes so you can see that visually represented down here in the channel rack as well kick kick kick kick and bass lines in between kick kick kick kick bass line notes in between now one way that we can avoid this conflict on the kick is probably the most obvious way and that is to come into the bass line and just get rid of every single note that the kick drum falls on so now when the kick comes through there's not going to be a competing bass note now this is a good technique however there is still going to be a conflict on the second note that plays because the kick sort of has a decay time that overlaps into the second note here let's see what that looks like in wave kandi so as you can see the initial bass note is gone there's no conflict there but this kick is sort of fading into the second note as well so why not get rid of two notes well we certainly can do that but then you start altering the nature of your groove so that sounds like this and as you can see now we can clearly see that the kick drum is overlapping into the second note so in order to make a groove work that you had before you'll want to use sidechain compression or a method similar to that if you like the groove that is the sort of dent that attended a tenth Adana then you basically don't need sidechain compression so let's put the notes back in to get back the groove that we wanted and let's get on with the methods of sidechain compression the first method I'm going to show you involves automating the level of the bass line mixer tracks volume so let's bring up the playlist and I'm just going to paste in the pattern that we've created it's just the kick drum in the bassline and I'm going to come down here to the level of the bass on the mixer track and right click and do create automation clip and I'm going to resize that so it's only one beat so that way I can set my one beat and then just repeat this automation clip throughout the playlist so what do we want to happen we want this bass line to get out of the way of the kick so I'm just going to drop this first node all the way down to zero and as you can see the mixer track drops along with it and I'm going to paste in the rest of these so we can hear what this sounds like so if you'll remember the bass line was only conflicting with the kick on the first two notes so what we can do now is tell the bass line to come back in at full volume by the time it gets to the third note which is right here so I've set my grid to snap to half beat so now that'll let me put in a point right here so I'm just going to right click and then I'm going to right click on this node and copy its value by hitting C on the keyboard and then right clicking back on the note I just created and hitting P for paste and that's just going to paste in the value that was on this node right here so now what's going to happen is the kick is going to come in the bass line is going to be at zero and then the bass line is going to fade in to full volume by the time it gets to the third note let's take a listen and so now what you can do with this technique is you can sort of tweak the tension of this point here so you can decide how long it takes to fade into full or if you want it to quickly fade into full you would do something like that and obviously these are all set to taste depending on your situation another thing I want to point out with this method is one little issue that you'll run into is when you're automating the level of one of these mixer tracks it's going to mess with the fact that you're using these mixer levels to set the overall level of the track when you're doing mix down so if something is too loud you'll want to turn it down but then when this automation clip plays it's going to turn it back up to whatever volume you have set here so it kind of gets to be a pain to manage that so one thing that I recommend you do in that case is to create a second base channel and I'm just going to call this one like base out and what you do is you route the original channel to the base out Channel and then take it off the master so that the base out channel is the one that's going to go out to master and then you have two levels that you can play with so whichever one you're automating is going to be the one that is opposite the one that you're going to set for your overall volume when you're doing your mix down so for example in this case we're automating this mixer track so I'm going to use this one over here to set the overall level of whatever I want it to be to make it fit into my mix that way these automation clips will not conflict with this value here the second method I want to show you is basically in my opinion an easier method of doing the one that I just showed you but it does involve a plugin that is not free but a really awesome useful one and that's called LFO tool it's made by the same guy who made serum steve Duda and it's just it's an awesome plugin it's got a lot of great uses so I'm going to load up the mixer and I'm going to put LFO tool on my bass track and so basically what we have here is a tool that lets you modulate these parameters here and we're going to be interested in this one the volume parameter so what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw in a shape not unlike the one that we just created in the playlist and by the way you can hold alt to snap your points to the grid and I'm just going to create the slope kind of towards the end so there no click so it sort of fades out nicely and so this is going to tell the volume to go from zero to full and then back out down to zero and in order for that to happen I do have to turn up this volume parameter all the way up to 100 so that gets the full effect and then I'm also going to turn this rate down to 1/4 so that means every beat this is going to happen to the volume so let's go ahead and see what this sounds like and let me turn it off just for comparison and back on again so one way you can modulate the effect of the sidechain compression from LFO tool is you can automate this dry/wet knob down here so with it all the way on the side chain effect is enabled and then if you want to disable it you just bring this knob all the way down to zero like I said you can automate this knob in the playlist view the third method I'm going to show you involves using the fruity peak controller so I'm just going to open the mixer and come over to the kick track and I'm going to put the peak controller on this track so this plug-in basically acts as a controller that lets you use the signals that whatever mix your track you've put it on to modulate something and it also has an LFO controller built in but we're going to just worry about this peak section for now so these four controls here are basically going to be used to shape the effect that the peak controller modulates a signal so the bass knob tells that where is the sound at base level in other words when the kick is not coming through what level should whatever I'm modulating be at the volume knob tells it what level to drop or raise to when the peak comes through the tension knob tells it how fast or how slow to transition between the two and the decay knob tells it basically how fast to reset back to zero if if that was confusing don't worry I'm going to basically link this controller to the base knob and I'm going to tweak these settings and you'll be able to visually see and you're the effect that it's having on the sound let's go so I'm going to come down to the mixer and link the level of the base to the peak of the peak controller okay I hit accept so let's go ahead and play and just see what happens here okay so now I got some tweaking to do to get this thing right so I'm going to play it through and I'm going to tweak it as it's playing let's see what I come up with that sounds good to me the fourth and final method I'm going to show you guys on how to side chain compress or sidechain daka sound involves the compressor it has arrived it is here the reason you guys clicked on this video just kidding the other three methods are just as awesome so let's go ahead and load up a pretty limiter on this track and I already have $1 just using this one to compress the sound for some more beefy stuff by the way if you haven't seen my tutorial on compression you should definitely check that out I'll put annotation or whatever for that here but we're going to use a separate fruity limiter for the sidechain compression component so I'm going to go ahead and put that on the baseline track and I'm going to go over to the comp tab now what we do with compression is we squish sounds so what we're going to do here is we're going to squish the sound to basically be the level that we want it to be when the kick drum is coming through so we want to squish this pretty well and let's do that now so I'm going to play it back and I'm going to squish it okay so now that is very compressed as you can see there's no real conflicts as the volume is really low on this thing but we don't want this effect to happen all the time so what we need to do is we need a sidechain the kick track to the bass track so let's come over to the kick track and we're going to click to send the signal to the bass track but what we're going to do is we're going to turn this volume knob all the way down and this is what a sidechain send looks like you're sending the signal to the bass track but you're not sending the audio so now on the bass track when we load up fruity limiter this little sidechain doohickey right here we can right click on it and hit kick now it knows that kick is being sidechain to this mixer track because we did it over here if I take it off the mixer track as you can see there's nothing in this list so as soon as like sidechain or send a signal to the bass track it knows it's there when I right click it lets me choose it alright let's play it back and see what we got and before I do that I'm just going to increase the resolution on this compressor so we can see what's going on in more detail now it looks like it's sort of doing what we want it's compressing these first two notes but it's sort of bleeding over into this third note so what what can we do about that well that's where this release knob comes into play the release basically tells the compressor how long to hang around before letting up so if we turn down the release we should be able to solve this little problem and be on our merry little way let's give it a shot how beautiful is that out of the four methods that I showed you I'd probably say that the second one using LFO tool is my go-to method and no it's not because I'm sponsored then but it just seems to be the quickest way for me to get the results that I want but all these methods have their place and not use them all throughout the years of producing so I recommend you guys learn these methods know these methods get good at these methods and who knows you might even come up with your own method that works even better than the ones I showed you in this video if you have any questions or anything was unclear please let me know and I'll be happy to help otherwise if you found this video helpful and you learned something please give it a like and consider subscribing because there will be much more awesome tutorials to come if you have any suggestions for future videos or tutorials you'd like to see for me please let me know as well otherwise I will catch you guys in the next video

Channel: Electronic Producer

Views: 126,223

Rating: 4.942162 out of 5

Keywords: sidechain, compression, tutorial, fl studio, ducking, pumping, how, to, best, method, lfo tool

Id: D0_CB9yv0T8

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 29 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/sirsotoxo]

Good video, I have always had problems with this, for 4 on the floor I fixed it using Kickstart but it doesn't work with another types of drum patterns, I'll try to get LFO Tool and try this.

[u/axemonk667]

how dare you assume my daw

[u/Fatnibs]

What version of FL is this? Why does this Fruity Limiter GUI look different than what I have ?

[u/EvisKing89]

I love FL studio 12!

[u/dudemanxx]

Good video! Watching your beginner tutorial now as well!