[chrisdee]

Personally i use side chain’ing mainly to let the kick control the low end of the bass and the bass control the lowend of any other instruments wich could interfere with the lowend of the kick and bass. Usually use a multiband compressor/eq plugin to only duck lowend.

I do this by inserting one bus send from the kick track, and another bus send from the bass track. I set both to pre fader and set the fader to 0db on each bus send.

If i want more creative ways to side chain i use the LfoTool plugin instead of dealing with all the routing and multiple plugins.

For lead vocals i send the main output of that track to a lead vocal effect bus wich i put delay, reverb, or whatever i want on. I let the plugins control the dry/wet signal instead of using multiple bus sends on the vocal track and dealing the dry/wet signal of them.

But thats just me. I like to keep it real simple but effective.