SideChaining

[bateskm]

Ok peeps I have an amateur question! how do I set up a side chain on my PT? or what do you recommend. I am losing my kicks in my bass. I also have 808's in the mix too. I have a home studio my room is treated with bath towels until I can afford some those high azz traps but hey do what you gotta do right. I am having a hell of a time getting the separation I want. I fancy myself a producer more than an engineer and plan to take my projects to a good engineer for the final touch but still want to hear want I need to hear to take the project as far as I can....advice is appreciated.............

[daeron80]

Don't worry about the towels. I have a 6'X8' carpet strapped to the ceiling by one end with a 2X4 and sheetrock screws, hanging down almost to the floor, about 2' from the back wall. Looks like hell but it sure cuts the flutter echoes. I also have a flannel shirt hanging on each wall, placed to damp reflections from the speakers to the monitor position. Treating the high end can be cheap. It's the low end that is unavoidably expensive.

Anyway, if the sidechain technique you're looking for is gating or compressing one track with the dynamic envelope of another, it's a very simple matter of placing an unused bus send on the one track, assigning that bus as the sidechain input on the gate or comp plug of the other, and enabling the sidechain button, where applicable.

If your kick conflagration is masking your bass instrument, the trick is to figure out how to EQ them in complimentary ways. There are no strict formulae for this. It just depends on what frequency ranges each instrument requires to sound right for that tune, and what they can afford give up to/share with another instrument.

E.g., kicks don't always need the info below 50 Hz - it can even interfere with the sense of impact; but bass often does, for depth and richness. In those cases, roll off the kick(s) at around 50 Hz @ 18 or 24 dB slope. Boost a little at about the same frequency with a low shelf to make a little hump at the lowest frequency necessary to the kick feel. Maybe boost the bass instrument with a low shelf, too, but be very careful about that, especially if monitoring in a room smaller than 2000 cubic feet and without full range monitors. You can easily do more harm than good.

Look for a place a bit higher up, anywhere from 150 to 800 Hz, that the kick sound is occupying and can afford to give to the bass, and bring it down about 3-9 dB with a 1 octave Q or so. Might need to boost the bass some in the same range. Make sure the the bass's "nose" and the kick's slap are not occupying the same frequency space, and if they are, do a little complimentary boost-cut to shape them out of each other's way.

OTOH, on some tunes, you need/want the extended low end in the kick(s). In that case, you may need to cut the kicks a little in a range centered somewhere between 80 and 200 Hz to give the bass some room to be heard. Or you can go for the legendary Paul McCartney bass sound, which relies heavily on lower mids (around 400-600 Hz) for tone, and leaves the earth shaking depths to the kick.

All this EQing should be done in the full mix context, or at least with both the kicks and bass being monitored together. Sharing is the key. The point is to get them to sound good together, not individually. Soloing them and getting them to sound great individually will lead you far astray from the goal.