What is Sidechaining? // Electronic Music Production Tutorial

if you're an aspiring music producer and you want to improve your sounds side-chaining can be one of the most powerful techniques and if you're unfamiliar with the term now is a good time as any to learn how and why you should use side-chaining so let's get into it [Music] hello there my inspirations my name is in spur a spur if you're a newer music producer and you're trying to improve your sounds and if you're unfamiliar with the terms sidechaining then this is the video for you to put it bluntly short and sweet sidechaining is the act of making one sound duck whenever a certain event triggers typically EDM artists use this to make drum sounds pop so for example a kick drum can be the triggering event to make another sound duck or lower in volume so that way anytime the kick drum is played the other sound that is sidechain to that drum temporarily gets quieter making the drum shine a little brighter for now I'll give you an example actually because I think it's best to learn by example in front of me here on my screen in Ableton I have two songs or at least parts of songs they're the exact same song they were exported from the same exact Ableton file except as you can see here one of these audio files includes sidechaining on different elements of the song and this other audio file does not have any sidechaining at all whatsoever so first i'm gonna play this audio file the no sidechain so you get a feel of what we're working with [Music] just a basic progressive house loop that I kind of threw together I learned how to make this from a youtuber named seven I give credit where credit is due it's an excellent tutorial series go check it out now this blue audio file it's the same exact song but with certain elements sidechains to the kick drums so for example the bassline chords leads sound effects that's pretty much it and the difference is staggering so here it is with side chaining immediately you'll notice that the kicks start to shine through as I mentioned and that's because by the power of side chaining you can tie the kick drums or in theory any other sound to any layer of your song and then anytime that sound plays the volume on that other layer temporarily duck's down again real quick I'm going to jump back and forth between no side chain and side chain just so you grasp the difference [Music] [Applause] [Music] so we know what side-chaining does great but how exactly do you get it to work and what do you do with it that is a great question so here is the Ableton session that I use to make that song and here are my kick drums used in this song it's important that I'm pointing this out of course because as I mentioned I've side chained by other elements to these kicks you'll notice that on certain layers of this song so for example this layer of chords down here in the bottom right I have a compressor and this is what's doing the side chaining as you can see here I'm gonna get rid of this for now so that way I can add my own compressor in and explain to you step by step how you sidechain the most basic sidechain in Ableton is the compressor as you just saw now you can download external and third-party plugins and vsts that are meant solely for side chaining and a lot of them out there are super high-quality but for the sake of this tutorial the compressor can provide the most basic version of side-chaining and can get the job done so in Ableton you just drag this compressor down onto your track that you want sidechaining on in any other DAW you can do this similarly you'll just have to look up how you do it using your certain software so now that I have this compressor on this track this chords layer I'm gonna click this arrow button and expand it out this brings up an interface on the left with a button that says sidechain it's currently grayed out which means it's off if I were to click it that means it's toggled and is now on let's solo my chords track to hear what it sounds like by itself [Music] just a simple stack of cords nothing too crazy I should have mentioned before I added the compressor and toggled the sidechain button that this sounds the same whether this compressor is here or not and that's because clicking the sidechain button doesn't just automatically magically create side-chaining I have to now route it from somewhere right below the sidechain button it says audio from there's a drop-down menu if I were to click it this shows every layer that's currently in this Ableton session essentially what this does is it allows me to pick an audio source that I will use to trigger the sidechaining so as i mentioned i'm gonna be using the kicks as my sidechain source what this will be doing is every time a kick drum plays the volume of this cords layer will dip temporarily twilit kick drum to come out and pop so I select my kicks layer and I hit play to see what that did sounds like nothing has happened and that's because for the most part nothing has if I were to go down here about in the middle of this black window and click this symbol right here this third most square this will show me the input from this Kicks track that I sidechain to so if I were to hit play [Music] this is an audio waveform of my kick drums if I were to solo these two tracks together and look at this graph as I play you'll notice that's when the kicks happen naturally the higher the peak is the louder the sound is and the lower it is the quieter so now if I were to click this second square when normally when you compress without sidechaining this will increase the volume of your track depending how much you compress it essentially adds more gain to your sound but once you sidechain this is now used to determine how strong that sidechain is if I were to click and drag this circle this is the knee you'll notice that because once I click and drag and move my mouse up or down it bends this line looks like a knee right you'll notice that once I click and drag this circle downwards and also bend the knee a little bit that's when the side-chaining action starts to happen so I'm gonna hit play and just slowly do that [Music] you'll notice that the closer I get to this bottom left corner determines how strong the side-chaining is how much I bend the knee then determines what percentage of the side-chaining I'm doing we're a straight line means zero percent or you can see this ratio says one to one so if I were to move this circle to the very bottom left corner and also bend the knee as far as I can I get an extreme amount of sidechaining if I were now to go back to this graph you'll notice that this orange bar which represents the volume of this current track it dips significantly once those kicks hit and you notice that over time it slowly gets a little bit louder then once the kick happens again it just drops immediately that creates the sawtooth pattern now I honestly think this is a little extreme so I'm gonna move this roughly to the middle and bend the knee I don't know about half way just kind of adjust it play around with it [Music] until I get that kind of bouncy feel that I want kind of feel that where goes one one Wow Wow [Music] and if I look at my graph this is what's happening again I suppose this isn't really a graph but you get what I'm saying [Music] from here you can also tweak parameters like the attack which determines how quickly the side-chaining will alter the volume so a super-low attack means this will take one second until the sidechain were to occur since it doesn't have a full second to actually do that obviously nothing really happens we're inversely the very opposite if I were to have the lowest attack that means the sidechain happens almost instantaneously these second that kick drum happens we're gonna leave it about 0.5 for now [Music] also this release indicates how long the side-chaining is activated for a low release means that it's only gonna wait one millisecond after the attack is done before it starts to go back up to full volume or until it is at full volume a very very high release so for example this case three seconds means after one sidechaining hit happens it'll take three seconds until it's back at full volume so you can tweak these parameters to adjust the sound to your liking ultimately the goal of side-chaining is to make one sound stick through typically drums and in this case kicks you can also side chain sounds to snare drums or maybe even a unique sound effect that you really want to stick through that you want to be prominent this way it makes your sounds fit together like puzzle pieces as opposed to being layered over top of each other like in the beginning of this video where you heard the comparison from a sidechain song to a song that is not sidechained the one without side chaining just sounds super muddy and that's just because there's a bunch of sounds on top of each other and you can't really hear the kick drum once you sidechain each element to the kick drum once that kick goes through it creates a temporary valley if you will in terms of silence there's a short burst of silence but that kick drum will then fill it in and that's pretty much it for the basics of side-chaining as I mentioned you can go way more complex if you were to get third party plugins and vsts but the concept is there so hopefully if you're a newer music producer you now have a better grasp on sidechaining if you didn't before and maybe you can use this knowledge to improve your mix and make a better song so that'll do it for this tutorial I appreciate you watching hope you learned a lot I will see you in the next one bye if you enjoyed this video please consider listening to my new single Tempest out now click this video to go listen to it or if you want to continue learning more awesome music stuff from me click here to watch my full music production tutorial playlist thanks for watching guys I appreciate it [Music]

Channel: InspirAspir

Views: 93,524

Keywords: Sidechaining, music, edm, electronic music, music production, tutorial, music production tutorial, how to make music, how to make edm, edm tutorial, electronic music tutorial, ableton, FL Studio, Logic Pro, Ableton tutorial, Sidechaining tutorial, what is sidechaining, music producer, FL Studio tutorial, InspirAspir, launchpad, light show

Id: MTDtKxQndDw

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 23 2017