this traction waveform tutorial looks at how to do sidechain compression in
tracktion waveform free and waveform pro it's very easy to
do and i'm using free plugins that are
included with waveform in this demo i'm zane welcome to simple
green tech where i do weekly audio tech tips
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and unleash your creativity now if you need to grab a copy of waveform
i've included a link to it in the description below along with some other
useful links you might want to check out so
be sure to look down there for that now let's jump into this
waveform tutorial alright very quickly i'll explain
sidechain compression basically it's when you use
one source or track to control the compression on another
track and this can be very helpful to duck a bass line out of the way when the
kick hits or you can use it to duck the music
while your vocal goes over top of it it can also be used in musical ways to
create some new sounds there are lots of creative ways that you
can use sidechain compression and tracktion waveform makes it extremely
easy now if you have the latest version of
waveform installed i believe it turns on plugin sandboxing by default so i
recommend turning that off for this as it will make things a lot easier and
then to turn it off just go up to settings down to plugins
and then down here you'll see enable plugin sandboxing and you just want to
click it off and then it's going to pop up saying
that you'll have to close any projects that you have
open and then reopen them in order for it to take effect so
do that if you have a project open and once that's ready go into your project
or open a new one and create a bass line and
also bring in a drum track so for this i'm using the micro drum
sampler which is free in both versions of waveform and i'm
also using the 4 osc synth which
again is free in both versions of waveform
here's the drum track that i came up
with all right just a basic little drum track
there and now here is the bass line that i'm going to
be using with the 4 osc
now let's listen to what they sound like when i play them both together
that bass line is kind of over top of everything
so what i'm going to do is add the side chain effect to the bass line so the
drum track will control the compression on the bass
so just right click in this area over here on your bass line track
go to add new plugin i'm going to use the waveform
compressor slash limiter and if it loads on the left side of your instrument
you want to drag it over to the right side
and here is our compressor and you see up here it says sidechain
none so click on that and then you choose the track that you
want to control the sidechain and for this the drum track is track three
and now down here you see sidechain let's turn it on
and i'm going to turn it on full so we get the full effect of this
and now let's play it back and then i'll mess around with these settings
so you can hear how the drum beat is affecting that bass line and it kind of
creates some space for the kick drum in there so let's
listen to it without and then with
and it really creates some interesting movement to that bass line so it's not
so stale so that's using the drum track to affect
the side chain of the bass line and we're also listening to the drum track
but you can also mute the drum track and it will still
affect the bass line so if you wanted this bass line to be affected by that
drum track but you didn't want that actual drum
track in there you can still have that same effect let's
listen to how that sounds
you can hear that it was still being affected by that drum beat even though
we weren't listening to the drum beat and this can work really
well with a droning sound like a pad or a droning bass
and i'm going to show you that right now but first i want to ask if you're
enjoying this video and getting some value out of it can you please give it a
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appreciate it so much now back into the tracktion waveform
tutorial so i have another instance of micro drum
sampler loaded on this track and you'll see it's just a basic kick
drum let's listen to how the drum track sounds on its own
alright so that is the drum beat that we're going to use to control the sidechain
of this instance of the 4 osc which i
have a pad loaded onto so here's what the pad
sounds like on its own just kind of boring keeps going on
droning in the same sort of sound so let's listen to what both of these
sound like together without the effect on
all right kind of boring now let's enable the compression
set the side chain as track three it's already turned on i have some settings
already in there and let's play both of these together
now
and you can really hear the effects of the compressor whenever the kick drum
comes in now let's just do it without hearing
the kick drum so we're going to mute that track
and we're just going to hear the effect of the drum track on the pad
without hearing the drums
so that's pretty cool it's created something different from a
rather droning sound now let's play it with
that other drum beat that we had so here's
what this drone sounds like without the effect
with the other drum beat
now here it is with the side chain being controlled by this
muted drum track
and of course there's so much more you can do with side chaining now if you
want to check out some of the best free compression plugins
available right now click up here or click down here to see what youtube
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thank you so much for watching for simple green tech
i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon