Let's make better music...together! - Sidechaining

Introduction:

Hello my fellow steemians!

Learning to make better music, like any other skill, requires a good combination of theoretical knowledge on the subject, and testing your theoretical knowledge in the field. The problem is, that free resources on topics like music production are often limited or just really hard to find.
I also believe that the easiest way to learn something is through other people, so my goal with this post and music related posts in the future, is to build a community of musicians, who WANT to share their knowledge about it with others. Today I'll be going over Sidechaining; what is it, how do we use it now and some ideas about how to use it differently in the future! I hope any music producers here can help fill in the blanks and expand on what I have already said, because I want to learn too!

So without further ado lets get into the topic.

Note: I use FL Studio for my music production and for the images I use in these articles, but these techniques apply in any DAW.

What is Sidechaining?

I'll start with a more technical sentence:
Sidechaining is a technique in music production, where you use one audios signal to interact with other audio.
Sound complicated? Don't worry! I'll break it down.
First off, what is an audio signal and how does it differ from the audio that we hear? An audio signal is a measure of the audio's peak. A sort of mapping of it's loudness if you will. In FL, you can see the peak of your signal in peak controller, like so:
Figure 1
The little hills you see here for instance are the peaks of my kicks. The higher up the line is, the higher the peak and the stronger the signal is in that time frame.
You can connect the audio signal to different mixer tracks like this in FL:

Figure 2
Notice that the knob is turned all the way down. This is so that ONLY the signal is sent to other tracks and it doesn't actually come out audible in other tracks.

So sidechaining is using the signal of one audio(a sort of mapping of its volume), in order to influence other audio in you mix.
In less formal circles, sidechaining usually refers to making something quieter while something else is playing. So,

How do we use Sidechaining?

Now that you know what sidechaining is(roughly), I'll go over some of the ways we use it.

The most common use of sidechaining, especially in electronic music, is reducing the volume of elements when the kick drum plays. The technique is also applicable to snares, sub-basses and really anything else you want to really stand out of your mix.

There are a few ways to do this and I will briefly go over the ones I use most often, or at least the ones I believe are used most often in production.

The first, most tried and tested method of sidechaining to reduce volume levels is with a compressor.

Figure 3

This is the fruity limiter, which is also a compressor, but any DAW has something that works the same way.(even if it looks differently) The top half of this compressor is the viewing window. You can see the peaks of the kicks, which are the same ones from figure 1, coming down from the the white line and the sound to which the kick was sidechained to is the greyish bar beneath it. You can see a little purple area in the sound coming in at the same time the kicks are hitting. This shows how much quieter the sound is becoming whenever the kick hits. This is currently the go to tool for volume based sidechaining, because it reads the sound in as it comes and makes things duck out based on how loud the other sound is in real time. If you want your sidechain to not be too noticable, this is what you're looking for.

Another strategy to sidechaining kicks is just to manually turn down the volume of the other instrument. This is more closely related to the 'sidechain effect', as no actual sidechaining is happening. To manually adjust things like volume in FL, we use automation clips.

Figure 4

Sidechaining with automation clips like in figure 4, is most commonly used in EDM, because it gives the instrument itself the rhythm of the kick.

The last sidechaining technique I'll be talking about, before getting into some experimental things, is Frequency specific sidechaining. This is when you only make a specific frequency of the instrument quieter, often done with basslines, because having low frequencies play at the same time(such as a kick and a bass) creates unwanted resonance in the mix. The way I usually go about it is by putting a peak controller on my kick and connecting the mix of a high pass filter to the peak.
Figure 5 shows the high pass filter, figure 6 the link to the controller and figure 7 the knob that was linked to the peak controller.

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

So how can we use sidechainig differently?

We've covered the main things sidechaining is used for – making elements quieter in order to make other elements stand out more – but sidechaining itself potentially has a lot more applications. I'll go over some of the weirder things I've used sidechaining for in the past and hope that this post can spark some ideas to use sidechaining more creatively in the future.

One of my favourite discoveries, was connecting the mix of distortion to the peak of the kick and simultaneously making the now distorted sound quieter. Distortion is an effect that is commonly associated with aggressiveness, but is also rather displeasing to the ear in large quantities. This amount of distortion is perfect and really highlights the aggressiveness of the kick. If I want to make something sound like it was written by a raging bull with a sailors mouth, I'm at least going to consider doing this every time.

Something weird I've tried out but have yet to find any real application for is seperating a sounds reverb from it and having the reverb compressor-sidechain to the original sound. Important here is that the sidechain has a high attack. As the sound hits it's loud but then the reverb sidechain hits and it gets quiter and then because it's quiter the reverb gets quiter and the compressor compressess less and the original sound gets louder and it basically swings in volume at weird intervals before finding a balance. I recommend trying this out on some plucks or pianos. Probably fits best in something rather ambient.

Lastly I'll talk about the something I dub the double bass. As stated previously, having multiple things play in the low frequencies makes the whole thing sound rather muddy(a producer slang term for unclean or poorly mixed), but If you frequency sidechain 1 bass to another bass and both of those to your kick, then nothings playing at the same time! On top of that, the bass which is being cut makes weird slide effects as it gets louder. I find this works best if you have a slightly higher bass that is sometimes off sometimes on cut into a lower bass that plays all the time, but playing around with this is generally super fun.

I hope you learned something from this post and hope to hear what things you have been trying out in regards to sidechaining! If you have anything you want to ask of me or another topic I should cover, feel free to ask and

LETS MAKE SOME AWESOME MUSIC