You can do this with all sorts of rhythms-the key is to experiment.Ĭlick the screenshot below to enlarge it.
The bass will bounce in response to the groove of the triplet, creating a rhythm previously unheard in the piece.
Now mute the output of that track, rendering it a dummy.įinally, set up a compressor on the bass, and assign the sidechain input to the dummy track you’ve just created. Or you could mess with the listener’s sense of balance, and sidechain the bass to a ghost! It doesn’t have to be complicated: set up another track, put your least CPU-intensive soft synth thereon, and hammer out a staccato triplet pattern. The listener will intuitively understand how the elements are linked, which might work out great. These are fun tricks, but they are in the realm of the expected. Key the bass to the kick, and the bass will swell up towards the snare key the bass to the snare, and it’ll creatively duck out in the middle of the measure. Sure, there’s a lot you could do to spice it up, even with conventional sidechain compression. This, in and of itself, could be quite boring. Say you have a measure-long loop with three simple parts: a kick hitting on the first beat a snare hitting on the third and a synth bass playing a long, sustained note throughout the measure. This topic was also covered in the EDM article, and it’s also worth expounding upon, as you can get a lot of mileage out of keying to elements that remain inaudible in the final mix. You could also use this effect in sidechaining hi-hats to snares, synth-pads to claps, or literally anything to anything else. Imagine using a multi-tap delay to trigger the sidechain that would be bizarre! Essentially, this would add an “attack delay” parameter to your sidechain compressor-or, depending on the delay, could cause the compressor to clamp down at weird intervals. This was mentioned briefly in our EDM mixing article, but it is worth expounding upon: you can add swing, swagger, groove, pocket, or other rhythmic variations to the previous trick by setting up a dummy track and delaying it ever so slightly.įor instance, you could send a kick to an aux track, put a fully wet, 70-millisecond delay on it, mute its output, and route that signal into the sidechain of a synth. Just make sure you stay within the boundaries of good taste as defined by the track.Ī fun design we made. Of course, the trick isn’t limited to bass elements any synth, vocal, or indeed the whole mix itself can be keyed to the kick. Get granular, for this is a big part of creating the groove. The attack and release parameters are your most important controls here, as they dictate how the bass will suck down when the kick hits, and how it will rise back up again. You take a synth-usually a bass-and put a compressor on it then you trigger its sidechain input with the signal of the kick. This has quickly become the defining sound of mainstream EDM, and you probably know how it works, but it’s worth repeating, in case you don’t: Revisit the classic kick/bass synth trick
Okay, enough disclaimers let’s get going! 1. However, they will constitute creative solutions to utilitarian problems, and thus, I’m hopeful you’ll find them quite handy all the same. Lastly, some of these might seem a little utilitarian on the surface. This would be a dummy track.Īnother piece of lingo you’ll see thrown around here is the verb “to key ” it’s pretty much interchangeable with the word “sidechain.” You could say “sidechain the hi-hat to the snare,” or conversely, “key the hi-hat to the snare.” It would mean roughly the same thing. In a few of these tips, I might ask you to copy a channel-say, the snare-edit it a little, and mute its output, so that you can’t hear it, but are still able trigger the sidechain input of a compressor.