Hey guys, David Glenn for davidglennrecording.com, mixingvocals.com, mixingacoustic.com — the
new course — and of course theproaudiofiles.com.
Get that stuff out of the way.
I’m gonna talk to you today about sidechain, not really sidechain compression, I don’t
know if you’d call it sidechain ducking, but we’ve used the FabFilter Pro-MB, I’ve
showed you that on the blog.
That’s a part of the course as well.
We dive deeper into that.
But now what I want to show you is kind of my new friend, I haven’t really switched
over completely to using it but I definitely like what it’s doing and I’ve actually
used it a little bit on the busses as well.
You’ll see these two bass tracks are going to a bass level.
And I’m gonna put that here and I’m gonna instantiate
Wavesfactory Trackspacer.
Some of you guys may know about this one, pretty sweet stuff going on with this.
I’ve got my kick here, kick level there, the kick goes out via a bus.
I’ve got that there.
It’s called kick SC, I need to pull that in up here, this is the sidechain.
I’m gonna go here, I’ve got it selected now.
Now, the kick is sending into this plugin, the plugin is getting it’s information from
the kick drum.
And then I’m gonna be able to click this little dot, this little circle over here in
the bottom corner, I’m gonna select sidechain, then what I’m gonna do is I’m going to
dial in my attack and release.
I’m gonna actually — I think that’s what’s gonna help me listen to the sidechain.
[kick drum]
Yep, you can hear it’s flaming because of the bus routing.
No big deal, but now we know that that’s working, our sidechain is set up correctly.
Now what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna exaggerate the junk out of the ratio, I’m gonna boost
that quite a bit and I’m gonna take, for the kick drum and the bass, I only want a
specific range to be pushed down.
What this plugin essentially is gonna do is it’s gonna push down the bass based on whatever
frequency range that I set, however many dB based on the ratio.
So I hope I’m explaining that well, but you’ll see here the low pass is set to 20,
I can leave that there.
The high pass, I’m gonna pull that down somewhere in the range of 100, maybe like
110, 120, something like that.
Let’s try that and then what it’s gonna do is — get rid of this menu — it’s
going to push down the bass, and you’ll see a graphic here, every time the kick hits
because it’s receiving the signal from the kick drum.
[kick drum sidechain with bass guitar ducking]
Let’s bypass it.
Pretty crazy, right?
Now we’re sending a pretty conservative level, we could probably send this a little,
let’s exaggerate it.
Alright, now you hear kind of that pumping vibe going on so it’s pretty straight forward.
I mean if you’re following me, 20 Hz to about 116 or so is getting pushed down by
the kick every time the kick hits in the bass guitar.
So pretty sweet way to blend in more of that low from the kick and help both of them kind
of sit there.
The only thing you want to be careful of is with this, it definitely feels like a hole
in your bass guitar if you aren’t gentle with it.
So what I would recommend is finding the settings, coming over here, boosting it like that.
You can come back in here and dial in your attack and release.
Let’s set the release really long so we hear this thing just really insanely exaggerated.
[kick drum with longer release time]
You hear how there’s like no lows in the bass?
Well that’s because the release is not coming back in time for the next kick hits.
The kicks just continue to push it out of the way.
So now if we dial in the attack a little bit quicker, we want it to be quick, and then
I’d like it to be super quick.
Almost like a really tight gate that’s allowing it to open and close in a way that just allows
it to, just a little bit of pulse from the sub kick region in the kick drum to hit the
bass down.
So let’s pull this release back.
[kick ducking sub bass region of bass guitar]
Yeah, so I’m finding that a faster release is really helping the kick to come through,
get it out of the way and not to miss too much of that bass.
And obviously this is exaggerated.
So then what I recommend is dropping the percentage down to zero and then sliding it up a little
bit.
[kick and bass]
Then bypass.
Yeah it almost sounds kinda flat whenever we bypass it.
Play that back a little bit.
Want to give a shoutout to my buddy Joey Fernandez for hooking me up out of Chicago telling me
about the Wavesfactory.
Pretty cool plugin.
I’m digging it.
And then something else I’m using it for, let me go ahead and share that.
Probably don’t have the tracks active but I’ve got these all busses here and I talk
way more about these in my training courses, but let’s say that you had a vocal, a lead
vocal, and your music was built up a little bit in the 800 to 2k range where the vocal
sweet spot tends to be.
Somewhere in there.
Let’s say that you had your music was built up a little bit too much in that area but
you liked the way the music sounds whenever the vocalist isn’t singing.
Well then you could ultimately, you could pull in the Wavesfactory Trackspacer and you
could set the range to be anywhere from that 800, 900 to 2k region, 1.5, something in there.
And then you can dial just a hint of the ratio so that anytime the vocalist is singing she’ll
push down the music in that frequency by just a tiny bit.
And obviously you can get crazy with it and push it really hard, but be careful not to
go too far, but ultimately do the same thing.
You’re gonna come in here, set up a buss to receive from the vocal.
In this case you could do all vocals but I would probably pull open your lead vocal and
send from your lead vocal into the all music.
So there’s another handy way that you can control allowing the lead vocal to dominate
that frequency range when she or he is singing, but then whenever there are no vocals, the
music can live and dominate the midrange the way that you may like it to.
So little tip on using Wavesfactory Trackspacer.
I hope you enjoy that.
Feel free to share it, like, subscribe, message the groups, blast these out.
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David@davidglennrecoridng.com, there’s a podcast soon to be coming your way with interviews
and all kinds of good stuff.
A membership site is in the works with session files.
All kinds of great stuff to come from that.
Don’t forget to check out mixingacoustic.com, the new premium training course, mixingvocals.com,
theproaudiofiles.com.
It’s a mouthful, and all the great stuff that we have coming your way soon.
So anyways, hope you loved this, we’ll talk to you soon.
Thanks again.