From the course: Tips and Tricks for Modern Producers

Sidechain multiband compression

From the course: Tips and Tricks for Modern Producers

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Sidechain multiband compression

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- [Instructor] All right, so many of you have probably used an external sidechain ducking a compressor, and we can do that with a multi-band as well. It's a lot of fun, so let's check it out. Let's go back to our good friends, the three amigos, the kick and our two bases. (smooth bass music) So the kick and the sub are still fighting a little bit, and I left it that way on purpose so that we would have something to fix, all right? So what I've done is, I've set up a bus here, I call it my kick duck, and I do that with mostly every mix that I have. It just seems to come in handy. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over to my sub and I'm going to open up a multi-band compressor. And what's cool about this, at least with the fab filter one, is that you can sidechain this externally. You can do this with wave stuff, too. It doesn't happen with every single multi-band compressor plugin, so read the manuals, check out what the possibilities are. I really like that you can do this with the fab filter. So if you've used a sidechain compressor before with a kick in the bass, I'm going to set this up, like so. I'm going to go to my bus and I'm going to say, hey, there's my kick duck, oh, there you are. Nice to see you. You as well, thank you. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to open this up here and I'm going to switch the sidechain to external, okay? I've chosen the external sidechain here. I'm telling it, hey, I want to use the external sidechain. And the way that I have this set up right now is, like, it's just a classic sidechain compressor. The entire frequency range is going up and down. when we use that kick, check it out. (smooth bass music) Also, 'cause your friend Evan's a smart guy, he made that send pre-fader. so if I don't have the kick soloed, I can still hear the artifacts of compression, which is kind of fun. (smooth bass music) Let's exaggerate. All right, so this is over the top. What we've done here is we've set it up so that this particular compressor, this band, which is right now affecting the whole frequency range, is reacting when the kick drum hits. It is not being controlled by the audio signal that it's processing, which is the sub, it's being controlled by an external bus that we've patched in here, our kick duck. So I'm going to bring this back so that we're only affecting this low end here, and the idea is that we're trying to make this kick sit and work really, really well and feel punchy and let the sub field punchy at the same time, and to mitigate any mud that we'd get from overlapping frequencies and phasing and things like that. And so the Pro-MB gives us a really unique opportunity, because we can leave all of punch of the top end and the mid range of that sub in, And we can still have the musical benefits of that, but we can make room in the low end almost instantaneously just for that kick by sidechaining it. And so we have this band, and let's just move it around and let's listen to how it sounds when we're only ducking the bass on the sub. (smooth bass music) - So what I'm going to do here is I'm actually going to turn the release way down, and I'm going to have everything moving kind of quickly, 'cause I want it to really pop in and out. (smooth bass music) There we go. Now, again, if you're using small speakers, it's going to be difficult to hear this, but I'm going to move the band up so that we can hear the timing a little bit better. (smooth bass music) Okay, cool. So let's move this back down and let's listen to the two together. (smooth bass music) - That's kind of nice. And see, I do like to listen to the speed and try to mitigate those artifacts as much as I can, but you really got to listen to it in the mix. So let's listen to it in the mix. ♪ Come and dance with me ♪ ♪ On the land and in the sea ♪ ♪ Time to let your body free ♪ ♪ Turn around and feel the beat ♪ ♪ Come and dance with me, on the land ♪ And in this case, we could even give it, if we could push the sub a little bit more and get a little more power out of it, 'cause it's not going to overwhelm the kick as much. ♪ Come and dance with me ♪ ♪ On the land and in the sea ♪ ♪ Time to let your body free ♪ ♪ Turn around and feel the beat ♪ ♪ Come and dance with me ♪ And here's without. ♪ Come and dance with me ♪ ♪ On the land and in the sea ♪ ♪ Time to let your body free ♪ ♪ Turn around and feel the beat ♪ ♪ Come and dance with me ♪ ♪ On the land and in the sea ♪ ♪ Time to let your body free ♪ ♪ Turn around and feel the beat ♪ ♪ Come and dance with me, on the ♪ Now, there are lot of different applications for this, it's really, really case sensitive, So don't take any of these settings as, like, a preset or anything like that, you got to use your ears. And one thing that I also would like to mention is that it doesn't have to be sort of a shelf. It could also be more of a bell shape, where it's just a certain range that we're carving out there. Maybe your kick drum is more mid-heavy and you don't really want it to worry about the bottom, you just need that punch happening. That might work really well here. This one takes some time to get dialed in really nicely. You can sort of chase your tail a little bit, especially if your monitoring environment isn't doing you a whole lot of favors in terms of having a really flat frequency response. So again, don't go overboard on this one. This is one of those things that I tend to use more often when I hear something that I'm having a little bit of trouble getting around, and this is, once in a while, just the thing that absolutely does the trick. Another great use of this sort of sidechain multi-band compressor technique is, let's say you need some more room on your vocals. You go ahead and you create a bus on your lead vocal track and you send it to the synth group, and you just have a little band here that gets ducked when vocal hits a certain section or something like that. You push that bus in, you got to make some room. Lot of great applications of this, just be careful. It's important not to overcook things, and I always say that with techniques like this, it's better to realize that you need something rather than go in thinking, oh, that's what I'll use. Use your ears, let your ears guide you. Don't go too far too soon, take some nice subtle steps, and that's when you're going to get the best result.

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