Hey what's up guys, David Glenn of davidglennrecording.com and theproaudiofiles.com.
Today I'm gonna be talking to you about sidechain compression with the kick and the bass. now
I know this has been covered quite a bit. You can run a google search, you can find
all kinds of stuff on this. I've specifically got a pop/hip-hop track here. The EDM thing
has been beat to death, I think there's all kinds of tools out there. You actually don't
even need to sidechain into a compressor anymore if you don't want to. They've got — what's
the plugin from Sonic Academy — Nicky Romero KICK and then there's, I believe the other
one is called Kickstart. It's incredible. You can pick the pumping rate and if you've
got a four on the floor, 128, whatever — all kinds of solutions for that.
What I want to talk to you about is tons of emails have been coming in about how do I
sidechain my kick and my bass with my parallel processing in the mix and all that kind of
stuff. So I'm gonna show you that and this song is called El Nombre De Jesus. It's from
Redimi2 featuring Christine D'clario. Very talented artist and we'll hit play and then
we'll dive right into what we've got going on. If I can hit the play button correctly.
[music]
Alright, cool. So, solid track. Let's scroll up and take a look at what the kick and the
bass are doing. Alright so here we have — get rid of that for a second — we've got my
kick that I've pulled in and generated the virtual instrument. You guys may have seen
that in my other stuff. KICK from Sonic Academy and Nicky Romero. And that kick, we'll solo
it, there's the kick. That is — not gonna go over the processing for that — but that's
going out a bus that I've labeled, I've renamed it kick sc. For kick sidechain. That's gonna
go to the end of my bass chain you'll see here I've got bass level. With the RBass,
some EQ, and then a multi-band. The FabFilter Pro-MB, a beautiful plugin. Using this on
all kinds of stuff. But sticking to the topic, I've got that coming in that buss, kick sc
is coming in the external chain of the FabFilter Pro-MB. And then within the bands you have
the option to select whether you want that to be triggered by an internal or an external
chain. So in this case I want the external. I want the kick to trigger the compression.
So in the very simplest form, you've got your bass guitar, it's rocking along. And if you
want the kick to dominate, by sending the kick into the compression, you can smack down
the level of whatever frequency range that you set and you can set how much you want
it to drop.
So, if I'm explaining that well enough, the kick is going to hit and instantly this sidechain
compression right here is going to drop those frequencies between the ranges of 20 and 132
Hz. They're all going to just smack down based on the threshold and the range that I set.
I've got a -8 range here. Which is actually a little bit steep for what I'm used to doing,
I guess I used my ears in this case. But that's the beauty of it. So you can still have subs
rocking the car, filling the room, whatever it is that you're — whatever your listening
environment is. But when that kick hits, it's gonna dominate in that frequency range. You
can see in this I've also got a midrange sidechain set up. I didn't use this in the song, but
before I did the tutorial I was like, you know, I hear a lot of the attack of the kick
competing with the fuzziness and the distortion that I put on the bass amp tone. So, I was
just messing around trying to see, hey, what would it sound like if I side-chained all
the mid and the upper of the bass so that that section, that frequency range dipped
as well. And I actually kind of liked it, so maybe something to consider in future works
is to look at how the kick mids and the highs are reacting to the bass mids and highs.
So let's listen to it. Enough of me talking. And let's see it in action. Let me actually
come back down here, I use Ozone at the end of my 2-buss chain and I've got the IRC set
to 3 which has an incredible amount of latency. So let's get a good visual representation,
let's scroll back up. Here we go from, say, right when the bass was in. Let's pull open
the Pro-MB. And let's focus in on just this sub region right here and what it's doing
and how that's working.
[kick and bass with FabFilter-Pro MB multiband sidechain compression]
Nice. So now I'm gonna bypass it and I want you to listen to how it just, it feels stale.
When I bypass it I feel like everything is just — it's almost just like a mess. It's
just kind of happening. Everything is just going. The kick is doing it's thing and there's
just no real like connection between the kick and the bass. So, let's bypass it and then
while it's playing I'll re-engage it and we'll hear the difference.
[kick and bass without FabFilter-Pro MB multiband sidechain compressor]
And then back in. Yeah, so I'm not used to saying, I don't like saying the word glue
too much, but if you've heard that, you kind of know what's going on there. So you can
hear them kind of gel together I guess a couple of things to be thinking about whenever you're
using sidechain compression is your attack time, your release time.
I like to let them be fast, I like it to be really quick. I like the attack to hit immediately
so it gets it's out of the way. And then I like the release to be quick so that as soon
as that sub — let me first say this: I like, most of the time you'll find that my kicks
are very very short in the decay/sustain/release department. They're gonna be really tight.
They're gonna be really punchy. And they're gonna get in, get out. They're gonna get out
of the way so the bass can resonate and fill that sub frequency space. But I love to have
a kick that hits you in the gut, hits you in the rear whenever you're driving down the
road. But it just kind of happens and the bass takes over the sustain part. So if that's
making sense. Hopefully I'm explaining that well.
If you have any questions feel free to hit me up, david[at]davidglennrecording.com. I'll
be sure to elaborate or find a better way to explain it. But that's kind of how I'm
working with kick and bass on rock/pop/hip-hop. I would do this in dance, but let me show
you real quick. There's another plugin, but it's a VST and I gotta pull it in through
the Bluecat's Patchwork here. And here we go, let's pull open — actually I just want
to see, here's Kickstart. This guy right here. So, this plugin right here. If you guys aren't
familiar with it go check this out, I've shown you kick, this is Kickstart. And it's just
by Nicky Romero, it's actually not by Sonic Academy on this one. And it's beautiful, man.
So you can actually pull back your mix percentage from 0 to 100. You can pick the different
types of sidechain effect that you want. And per instrument, you can give it it's own character
to how it relates to a four on the floor kick. So and then you can set it to be obviously
8th, half, whole note sidechain. So feel free to check that out, that's the Nicky Romero
Kickstart. And that's gonna be more applicable towards EDM dance music where you have a four
on the floor type beat. And some great stuff there, man.
So hopefully you guys are picking that up. By all means, hit me up via email if you have
any questions on the kick sidechain, attack, release, threshold — and of that stuff if
you want me to elaborate feel free to hit me up and we'll talk then. So talk to you
guys soon.