Sidechaining tricks

Timeless Flows

New member
Hey guys. Don;t know how to do this in FL Studio so i wanted to ask you how you can make your kick only to sidechain your melody? I am really curious to now if you could share :)
 
Side chaining is a pretty "dance-edm" style of music technique. It can used in other genres/ kinds of beats, but t's not the main attraction. If you're making dance edm, ya go ahead and learn it. I remember it was one of the first things I learned when I started producing. :) The video in the previous post should do the trick.
 
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i've found sidechaining can actually be great in general for any 4 on the floor typed drum based track. Even very subtle sidechain can open up more breathing room for other elements, and allows you to actually limit the track harder than without any sidechain due to the added space in the mix which can be a great benefit.
 
Sidechaining is a great accent, it really keeps the track flowing and adds some spice when there's no kick around
 
Another trick, I'm not sure how to do it in FL since I don't use it, but if you want to get a 4/4 sidechain pump in either a track that doesn't have a 4/4 kick, or say a break down where the kick isn't present, make a 4/4 kick pattern, route the sidechain to it, but route the audio to an out that isn't actually in use (for instance in Ableton you can send the audio to an external out that isn't being used).
 
Side chaining is a pretty "dance-edm" style of music technique. It can used in other genres/ kinds of beats, but t's not the main attraction. If you're making dance edm, ya go ahead and learn it. I remember it was one of the first things I learned when I started producing. :) The video in the previous post should do the trick.


I'm aware that this is a very late response, but side-chaining is much, much more than the method commonly used to make an element in a song duck rythmically. That is only one use of side-chaining, and that applies strictly to compression. Side-chaining can be used with many different effects, for many different purposes, in many different genres. I'm no guru (far from it), but one thing I've learned recently is side-chaining a kick drum to a gate or expander that is on an fx channel after a tone generator to trigger a sine wave every time the kick hits. I've also used side-chaining with Fabfilter's Pro Q 2 to enable it to copy the eq that has been applied to another piece of audio, regardless of what was used to do it. As another member mentioned, side-chaining into a compressor is also how you keep your kick and 808 living in the low-end together without being a big, muddy mess.

For the OP, to get that breathing effect, make a track with some sound on 4/4 timing, send it to a dummy output (as in it is not audible), sidechain it to a compressor on whatever sound you want that effect on, and set your ratio, threshold, and knee accordingly. It will be a "harder" knee obviously, due to the emphasized ducking of the compressed sound.
 
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