Are these "hip-hop" fellas sidechaining?

[kRza.]

In hip hop production, noticeably in J.Dillas and Mad-Lib production,...there are times when the kick will 'suck down' a particular part of the tune - either the bass or the loop.
Is this just a simple sidechain? If so...could anyone please explain sidechaining?! Or the kick and the "___" on the same bus?
thanks

[watergunfight]

In hip hop production, noticeably in J.Dillas and Mad-Lib production,...there are times when the kick will 'suck down' a particular part of the tune - either the bass or the loop.
Is this just a simple sidechain? If so...could anyone please explain sidechaining?! Or the kick and the "___" on the same bus?
thanks

J Dilla was amazing. On Donuts I hear that on a lot of tracks, some with kick and snare. If I had to guess, which is no help, I would think its sidechaining, which is where you are feeding one track (say, the kick) into the key input of another tracks compressor (the sample), so that the one track is being used to trigger the compressor on the other track

[I'm Painting Again]

I know one of the old tricks was to "key" via sidechaining a low synth tone over and with the duration of the kick hit to get a really crazy awesome kick sound..

I think they higpassed a mult of the kick drum and sent it to the sidechain input and had that work the comp with the low synth to the inputs of the comp then mixed it back in to the song..something like that..

this link shows a DAW based version with a gate to give you an idea of what I'm thinking:

http://www.dandont.com/invision/index.p ... topic=3050

[kdarr]

That M.I.A. song, "20 Dollars" does this too... the kick sort of sucks the whole track down behind it. I had figured it was an artifact of having a very loud kick and heavy brickwall limiting in the mastering process, but it's possible that it was a sidechain thing. Either way it sounds pretty cool for that particular track, and the J. Dilla stuff too.

[<|>]

[Ryan Wasoba]

I've been wondering about this too. Justice does it a lot on their new record, it sounds to me like a really slow release time on a really intense limiter.

[drumsound]

The way you are describing it, it sounds like a lack of sidechaining. Often the reason one might use the sidechain on a compressor would be because a low sound is triggering the compressor and sucking down too much of the signal. Then one might put an EQ or filter in the sidechain so the compressor's detector doesn't 'hear' frequencies below a certain point and thus doesn't compress when those loud low signals (like BD or bass drops) are present.

What you are describing sounds like loud BD/bass drops are triggfering the compression.

[iC]

perhaps the term is "keying"?

[kRza.]

What you are describing sounds like loud BD/bass drops are triggfering the compression.

....well isn't this what sidechaining is? i'm thoroughly confused.

[msmith]

What Tony is saying is that when youre mixing through a 2 track compressor, the bass(ie kick or bass guitar) can have a tendency to trigger the compressor quite a bit more than the other instrumentation. So, thinking this way, they could have simply acheived the effect simply by just turning the kick drum up in the mix so it simply triggers the 2 track compressor quite a bit more than normal...This would pull the whole mix down and accent the bass drum quite a bit...The sidechain route would have more control than this method, so that would be the main consideration for doing it that way...

[Dr Rubberfunk]

I think the way Madlib & J Dilla are doing it is probably similar to the way Daft Punk have been doing it for a while on their particular french house sound (which Justice and others have 'inherited') Using the kick drum as the key on the bassline to effectively 'duck' the b-line under the kick and create that 'pumping' sort of sound - whether it's officially side-chaining, or just flat out brick wall limiting is anybody's guess nowadays in commercial dance (OMG AUDIO WARZ!!!11) but I'm pretty sure Daft Punk were sidechaining when they started it all. It's become a bit of an overused effect in dance music, but sounds cool when you hear it elsewhere, which is why I don't mind hearing it in that leftfield instrumental hip hop context ...

[iC]

As a creative technique, i have used the "key" on a compressor and/or gate to "duck" for effect. On one hiphop record i worked on, i would key the drone in the track with a shaker track to accentuate "aural movement"... changing the drone into more of a pulse.... at the time i was listening to the latin playboys records religiously (still am....), i believe one can hear this technique all over these records...
"Ducking can also be used for program material, like using the singer's track to duck the rest of the bannd, thus keeping the voice out front of the rest of the mix, or in broadcasting to bring on the announcer
One can also use the "key" for sidechaining which i have always taken as more of a frequency specific compression, i.e. de-essing,and/or high-pass filter before RMS detection.

[drumsound]

The sidechain, key input or detector input on a compressor are all the same thing. They give you an input that goes to the detection circuit of the compressor. It does not pass audio to the compressor's output. The most common uses (seem to be) are for a filter/EQ of some sorts. By putting for instance a low cut filter into the sidechain the compressor circuit only listens to the frequencies above the filter and thusly only reacts to those frequencies. The audio I/O is still passing full band audio. The idea in this example is that low frequencies are powerful and quite dominant and will therefore trigger the compressor and often make it 'pump and breathe' which may not be desirable to the engineer. By having this filter in the compressor doesn't 'listen' to this low frequency information and doesn't compress the source when these low tones push through. The compression will not pump and breathe (at least not in the same way/not as much) which can be very useful. Some compressors have a built in filter to do just that. The Drawmer '69/'68, API 2500 and Mindprint T-comp come to mind.

Another use for the sidechain input is to make the compressor on one source react to a different source. An example might be the BD and bass guitar. To make the BD punch through and make the bass and BD sound a little tighter you might put the BD in the sidechain input of the bass compressor. Now each time the BD is hit the bass is compressed. Or the above-mentioned shaker and vocal examples.

The reason I said I think it?s the lack of sidechain input on the original question is that without anything in the sidechain the compressor will react to the loudest thing at any given moment. On a hip-hop record the BD/bass drop/low end stuff is very likely to be the loudest thing in the mix.

[kRza.]

so then let me ask a potentially dull question:

..how would one go about this with plugins? Using Cubase SX3? I'm following yr logic on what it does,..just not sure the logistics of 'how' it is achieved.
thanks

[kdarr]

so then let me ask a potentially dull question:

..how would one go about this with plugins? Using Cubase SX3? I'm following yr logic on what it does,..just not sure the logistics of 'how' it is achieved.
thanks

Well, there were two separate things discusses in this thread. If you're looking for the huge, track-pump sound you mentioned in the original post, then any sort of brickwall "mastering" limiter will work when used on the 2-track mix.

One of the most popular examples is the Waves L2/L3. Smash the crap out of the 2-track mix to make it super loud, and if the kick is the loudest thing in the mix, then everything will kind of automatically suck down behind it. Make sense?

If you're looking to do more of a controlled, sidechained thing, then any compressor plug that has a "sidechain," "trigger," "ducker,"or "key" input can do it within a multrack session. What you would do is create a bus and route all the tracks to it that you want to have pulled down by the kick. Strap the compressor on that bus, and use your kickdrum as the trigger input, so now the kick will be what CONTROLS the compressor that is PROCESSING everything that's on the bus. Adjust to taste. A slow release will accentuate the ducking, sucking effect.

Does that help?

[<|>]

[pulse_divider]

I don't want to derail the topic, but is it possible to use a stereo link input (like on the 1176) as a makeshift sidechain input?